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WEEK-DAY SERMONS 
IN KING’S CHAPEL 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK + BOSTON - CHICAGO - DALLAS 
ATLANTA - SAN FRANCISCO 


MACMILLAN & CO., Limitep 
LONDON - BOMBAY + CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 


THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lim. 
TORONTO 


WEEK-DAY SERMONS 
IN KING’S CHAPEL 


PON ‘ts Bilin 
AWRY si hegyy ah 









SERMONS PREACHED TO 
WEEK-DAY CONGREGATIONS 
IN KING’S CHAPEL, BOSTON 


BY 


Peter AINSLIE; BisHop WILLIAM F. ANDERSON; DEAN 
Cuarves R. Brown; Rev. James Gorpon GILKEY, 
D.D., Principat L. P. JAacKs; ALEXANDER Mac- 
CoLL; BisHop Francis J. McConNELL; Oscar 
E. Maurer; Witit1AM P. Merritt; FRep- 
ERIC W. PERKINS; Proressor Harris 
FRANKLIN RALL; RICHARD ROBERTS; 
Minot Simons; Proressor "THEODORE 
GERALD SoARES; Dean Wittarp L. 
SPERRY; WILLIAM L. SULLIVAN; 
PrincipAL R. Bruce TAYLor; 

ExLwoop WORCESTER. 


EDITED, WITH A FOREWORD, 
BY \/ 
Harotp E. B. SpEeIGHT 


jQew ork 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1925 


All rights reserved 


CopyRIGHT, 1925, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 


Set up and printed. 
Published October, 1925. 


Printed in the United States of America by 
J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK 


DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY 
OF THE PIONEERS OF 
CHRISTIAN UNITY 
WHO PREPARED THE CHURCHES 
FOR THE LARGER FELLOWSHIP 
OF TO-DAY 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/weekdaysermonsinOOspel 


FOREWORD 


A church situated in the heart of a large city 
is compelled to-day to face a serious problem created 
by changed and changing conditions. Its oppor- 
tunity for ministry to a permanent constituency of 
any considerable size is likely to be limited by the 
scattering of families towards the outskirts of the 
city; by the inevitable and natural desire of city 
workers, confined on week-days to indoor tasks, 
for a weekly day of rest that will give a complete 
change from the city; by the facilities for rapid 
transportation which bring the country within the 
reach of all. The down-town church may adopt 
either of two attitudes towards such changes. It 
may bemoan its fate, condemn the interests which 
have carried off its adherents, cling as long as pos- 
sible to methods which were suitable in other days, 
‘and then at last realize a cash return for its site 
in order to build a modern “plant” in the suburbs 
and start life anew. Or it may examine the limita- 
tions involved in its location and see whether they 
cannot yield a hitherto unsuspected opportunity, 
Imagination can sometimes transfer liabilities into 
the list of assets. If the aim of a down-town church 
is not merely to survive but to serve, it can adapt 
its service to the conditions which surround it, 
opening its doors when people are within reach of 

7 


8 FOREWORD 


them, and bringing its ministrations into close touch 
with their daily needs. 

The sermons in this volume were preached to week- 
day congregations in King’s Chapel, Boston, where 
services are held every week-day except Saturday 
for seven months of the year. For such services 
the location, at one of the busiest corners of the 
business district, is a distinct asset. The historic 
building, erected in°1749 (the first stone building 
in Boston), the old pulpit dating from 1717 (the 
oldest in the country still in use on its original site), 
the quiet retreat to be found within the massive 
granite walls that shut out the roar of traffic, the 
inescapable sense of enduring and spiritual realities 
that pervades the building and takes possession of 
the most casual visitor, all combine to offer an 
equipment of a unique character. Daily the Paul 
Revere bell summons from offices, stores, and 
streets a company of worshipers who come for the 
inspiration they believe they may find in the quiet 
of the sanctuary, in the ministry of great music, in 
the act of faith which unites rich and poor and wise 
and ignorant in a common prayer, in the message 
spoken from the pulpit with the authority of sin- 
cerity and the power of sympathy, in the uplifted 
song of universal hope and praise. ‘The spirit of 
the service is carried by the radio into many dis- 
tant homes and hospitals, and even into workshops 
and factories where groups gather to listen in dur- 
ing the noon rest. 

The visiting preachers are drawn from many 
religious communions and from various parts of 
this country and abroad. The co-operation of these 


FOREWORD 9 


leaders, willing to come for three or four days at 
a time, has made the venture possible. With rep- 
resentative preachers of different denominations 
succeeding one another week by week no suspicion 
has been possible that the enterprise is inspired by 
sectarian ambitions, and the notable agreement in 
emphasis which has marked the contributions of the 
visitors from so many fields of labor has demon- 
strated how close in spirit and purpose are the 
progressive leaders of Protestantism in our time. 
Already, at the close of the second season of the 
present enterprise, one or two conclusions seem to 
be justified—seem, indeed, to be unavoidable. In 
these respects results have confirmed the expecta- 
tions entertained at the outset. First is the con- 
clusion that when the Christian Faith is proclaimed 
in its own right as an attitude of trust and confi- 
dence that gives to everyday tasks a new worth and 
meaning, as a mood of the spirit that will bless all 
life if it becomes habitual, as an acceptance of the 
challenge of life, the good tidings are heard gladly 
and the pulpit is accorded as great a respect as it 
ever had. When the ministrations of the Christian 
religion are brought freshly to the hearts and souls 
of men and women by those who speak out of a 
rich experience and a great sympathy, when its 
message is set free from confusing, irrelevant, and 
debatable propositions claiming to be authoritative 
and essential points of belief, the response is as 
genuine and as grateful as it ever was in earlier 
days. Men and women consciously in need of a 
vitalizing, healing, and saving faith, for lack of 
which their days are spent in carrying the burdens 


10 FOREWORD 


of anxiety with impaired energy, wrestling with 
despondency, trying to escape from the toils of fear, 
or finding new ways of killing time, are willing and 
glad to interrupt the day’s work and seek a new 
perspective, a more satisfying motive, and a more 
real success. And as is the life of individuals in 
need of faith, so is their life in its co-operative 
endeavors. Within the nation there is class-spirit, 
unyielding in its reliance upon force; there is selfish 
sectionalism exhibited by various groups; there is 
individualism which rejects all self-discipline. 
These are signs always of the lack of unifying and 
universally authoritative conceptions and motives. 
Everywhere there is this challenge to the Christian 
Faith, not so much to justify itself on intellectual 
grounds to a skeptical world as to validate itself in 
its distribution of spiritual power. Men and groups 
of men who understand and freely use every other 
known kind of power have ignored or failed to make 
vital connection with the ultimate and most impor- 
tant of all kinds of power, the power of spiritual 
purpose. To demonstrate anew the value of that 
power, to offer it to men not in suppliant appeal 
for their condescending acceptance, but with the 
authoritative and winning conviction that compels 
attention, to interpret it where it is not yet under- 
stood, to apply it where it is gravely needed for 
the redemption of life from triviality and foolish 
waste, is the appropriate function, the urgent duty, 
and the most rewarding service of the Christian 
Church in our day. 

A second conclusion is that the larger faith pro- 
claimed by those who call themselves, or are com- 


FOREWORD 11 


monly understood to be, liberal Christians is not, 
as has so often been said of it, cold and intellectual 
in its appeal. On the contrary, when it is pro- 
claimed with the authority that always belongs to 
sincere speech, with an urgency that springs from 
a sense of responsibility, with a tender sympathy 
for wayward, sinful, blind, and burdened souls, it 
is a veritable evangel, moving the heart and quick- 
ening the reserves of energy into action. ‘“Mod- 
ernism,’ writes one who has no sympathy with 
liberal tendencies of thought, “results in a steadily 
diminishing ardour in the spiritual side of life.” 
The remark comes from one who could have found 
evidence to the contrary within a stone’s throw of 
the study in which he wrote. Emotionalism is not 
necessarily “ardour in the spiritual side of life’; 
abandonment of revivalistic methods does not neces- 
sarily spell decline of concern for the souls of men 
and women. A faith that is at least not in conflict 
with the ordered knowledge by which we live, a faith 
that rests on the certainties of our being rather than 
on debatable matters of historical or unhistorical 
record, is a faith so full of hope for men, so moving 
in its appeal for co-operative service, so universal 
in its regard for human need that its issue is not 
only in ardor but in action. 

The old Chapel was once an unwelcome intruder 
in the life of Boston. “His Majesty’s Chapel in 
New England” gravely offended Puritan sentiment. 
But on the two hundredth anniversary of its pulpit 
Dr. Francis G. Peabody could say of it that “set like 
a great, gray boulder amid the haste and fret of 
the city life’ it had “remained through all the pass- 


12 FOREWORD 


ing years, like the shadow of a great rock in a weary 
land.” The sermons here gathered, selected with 
difficulty from among the many lately preached, are 
worthy of the traditions of a pulpit which, in the 
words of the same interpreter, himself a son of 
King’s Chapel, “has spoken the same gospel in the 
changing accents which the changes of time com- 
pelled,—one language in varied dialects, the gospel 
of the devout life, the message of the spirit.” They. 
are now offered to a wider audience as a contribu- 
tion from one church to the many movements which 
in our time are exemplifying Christian Unity. 


HAROLD ‘EE. B, SPEIGHAG 
King’s Chapel, 
September 1, 1925. 


I] 


III 


IV 


CONTENTS 


EDITOR’S FOREWORD . 
by Rev. Harotp FE. B. Speicut, 
D.D., Minister of King’s fee 

Boston, Massachusetts . 


THE PARABLE OF THE ABSENCE 
COOL) sonar Mn rae Ae 
by Principat L. ‘P; ene: adhe 

LL.D., Manchester College, Ox- 
ford, Editor of the Hibbert Journal 


THE FAITH OF A SOLDIER 
by Rev. CHARLES REYNOLDS Brown, 
D.D., LL.D., Dean of the Divinity 
School of Yale University. 


THE SPIRIT OF FEARLESSNESS 
AND REVERENCE. . 
by Rev. WiLL1AM PIERSON Weeet es 
D.D., Brick Presbyterian Church, 
New York City. 


THE HEAVENLY VISION . 
by Bispop WILLIAM F. ANDERSON, 
D.D., LL.D., Methodist Episcopal 
Church, New England Area, Tem- 
porary President of Boston Uni- 
versity. 
13 


PAGE 


19 


25 


35 


45 


14 CONTENTS 


V. “EREASURE TROVE: 


by Rev. RicHArD Roserts, D.D., 
American Presbyterian Church, 


Montreal, Canada. 


VI THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL 


by Rev. Oscar Epwarp MAurer, 
D.D., Center Church, New Haven, 


Connecticut (Congregational). 


VITVIHE WAY WHIGHSIS spr Shh las 


by Rev. Principat R. Bruce Taytor, 
D.D., LL.D., Queen's “University, 
Kingston, Canada 


VIII THE ATTAINMENT OF FREE- 
DOM 
by Rev. Parke Aor DD.. LDS 
The Christian Temple, Baltimore, 
‘Maryland (Disciples), President of 
the Association for the Promotion 
of Christian Unity and Editor of 
the Christian Union Quarterly. 


IX FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT . 


by Rev. WixiiaM L. Suttivan, D.D., 
Church of the Messiah, St. Louis, 
Missouri (Unitarian). 


xX / LIVING WITH OTHER PEOP ie. 


by Rev, ALEXANDER MacCo tt, D.D., 
Second Presbyterian Church, Phil- 
adelphia, Pennsylvania. 


XI WORSHIP AS INSIGHT . 


by Rev. ProFEssoR THEODORE GER- 
ALD Soares, Ph.D., D.D., Professor 


PAGE 


53 


65 


73 


83 


go 


103 


XIII 


XIV 


XV 


XVI 


XVII 


CONTENTS 


of Preaching and Religious Educa- 
tion and Head of the Department 
of Practical Theology in the Uni- 
versity of Chicago. 


MORAL PREPAREDNESS . 


by Rev. Mrnot Simons, D.D., All 
Souls Church, New York City 
(Unitarian). 


IRON CHARIOTS IN THE ROAD 


by Rev. JAMES Gorpon GILKEY, D.D., 
South Congregational Church, 
Springfield, Massachusetts, Profes- 
sor of Biblical Literature, Amherst 
College. 


THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE SUF- 
HURINGS£O Bais UiSien bo 
by Rev. Witiarp L. Sperry, DD., 
Dean of the Theological School in 
Harvard University. 


THE RESURRECTION: A _ SER- 
MON FOR EASTERTIDE . : 
by Rev. Etwoop Worcester, D.D., 

Rector of Emmanuel Church, Bos- 
ton, Massachusetts (Protestant 
Episcopal). 


THE VISION OF THE PURE. 


by BisHop Francis J. McConNneELL, 
D.D., LL.D., Methodist Episcopal 
Church, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 


AGW ONS AD oO LE OUR A ts 


by Rev. Proressor Harris FRANK- 
Lin Ratz, D.D.;. Professor of 


15 


PAGE 


114 


124 


136 


143 


153 


163 


16 CONTENTS 


PAGE 
Christian Doctrine, Garrett Biblical 
Institute, Evanston, Illinois. 


XVIT VTHE INTERPRETING (CHR ES Tae 


by Rev. FrepEric W. Perkins, D.D., 
First Universalist Church, Lynn, 
Massachusetts. 


WEEK-DAY SERMONS 
IN KING’S CHAPEL 


ut 





THE PARABLE OF THE ABSENCE OF GOD. 


Principat L. P. Jacks, Oxford 


“The Kingdom of Heaven is as a man travelling into a far 
country.”-——Matthew xxv. 14. 


In these days most thoughtful persons who believe 
in God believe in him as an ever-present reality in 
their lives and in the world. There is no point in 
space and there is no moment of time in which God 
is not. He is present everywhere and always a 
motion and a spirit that pervades all thinking things, 
all objects of all thought. We call that the “imma- 
nence of God.” “The constant presence of God” is 
a familiar expression of our religious phraseology. 
We use it in hymns, we use it in prayers, we repeat 
it in sermons. We carry this thought to great 
lengths. We affirm that God is not only present as 
a spectator might be present to see what is going on 
upon the stage of the world, but that he is an active 
partner in everything that happens; so that nothing 
can take place in nature, or in history, or in our per- 
sonal experience without God contributing to make 
it what it is, without the event or the experience 
having some quality, or tone, or aspect which it owes 
to the operating presence of the divine spirit within 
it. God is present in the good things so far as we 
know that they are good and rejoice in them, and 

19 


20 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


he is present in the evil things so far as we know 
that they are evil and hate and oppose them. He is 
within us as the spirit of joy; and he is within us 
as the spirit of grief and righteous anger. It may 
be that we carry a heavy cross; but the moment that 
we recognize that it is a cross and not a mere piece 
of timber that we carry the divine quality is present 
and God is there. In all these things God asserts 
his presence, not as a mere spectator, but as an active 
partner in what is going on. To such lengths have 
we carried the thought of the constant presence of 
God. And we have done well in that; we have 
obtained by it a much deeper and truer view of the 
divine nature than those men who thought of him as 
a distant ruler of the universe, observing it with an 
ever-watchful eye, but himself having no part in its 
joys and sorrows, its victories and defeats, its vicissi- 
tudes, dramas and tragedies. 

That is the “immanence.” Now for the “tran- 
scendence.” Though God is always ‘present, we are 
not always aware of his presence, and we are not 
intended to be. It would be impossible for beings 
with a nature such as ours to bear the strain of being 
constantly aware of so momentous a reality as God. 
We should be overwhelmed, blinded and paralysed, 
and wholly unfitted to play the part and to bear the 
burdens assigned us. So far as our awareness of 
God is concerned he is absent more often than he is 
present, and must be so if the work of life is to go 
on at all. 

This is the point on which the Parable of the 
Talents turns. The subject of it is, we may say, 
the absence of God. The absence of God is here 


THE PARABLE OF THE ABSENCE OF GOD 21 


presented as the other side to his presence, and the 
two are so closely connected that we cannot under- 
stand the one unless we also understand the other. 
The master of our lives is represented as one who 
goes away: one who leaves us behind. He is as a 
man travelling into a far country, out of sight and 
out of sound of those whom he has left in charge 
of his goods. He is absent, he is absent for long; 
but he is not absent for ever. His absence is no 
abandonment; he will come back in his own time, 
and he leaves us for our own good. “It is expe- 
dient,” said Jesus, “that I go away.” 

What the divine presence means for you while 
he is here, depends on how you bear his absence 
while he is not here. Bear his absence well, and 
then, when he comes back, you shall enter into the 
joy of your lord and be made a ruler over cities. 
Bear it ill, misuse it, make it an opportunity to 
forget him and to betray him, as you easily may, 
and the result will be that, when he returns, you 
will not even know him, you will not recognise him 
in his true character as your saviour and your friend, 
but will think that he is a hard man, a tyrant and an 
oppressor, reaping where he has not sown and gath- 
ering where he has not strawed. Your loyalty in 
his absence is precisely what enables you to under- 
stand his presence and to rejoice in it. Your 
treachery in his absence is precisely what blinds you 
to his presence, and turns it into a calamity. Thus 
the presence and the absence of God, the immanence 
and the transcendence, are woven together, and the 
spiritual life becomes the harmonious rhythm of 
the two. 


22 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


It is the nature of all spiritual realities to be 
unobtrusive. They do not strive nor cry, nor lift 
up their voices in the street. They do not force 
themselves upon our observation. For the most part 
they are fugitive visitors. They come and go; they 
come without observation and they go away without 
noisy farewells. Just because they are so high they 
are commonly out of sight, like the summit of 
Mount Everest. They are elusive things. -They 
take long journeys, travel into far countries, fade 
into the dim distance. They touch our souls in 
passing, they linger a little, and they are gone. 
There is a certain aloofness about spiritual realities. 

None of us can serve the Highest unless we are 
prepared for occasions when the reasons for serving 
it are out of sight. Mostly we see only a part of 
the reasons; hardly ever do we see the whole of 
them; and sometimes we see no reason at all but 
have to sustain ourselves by the memory of some 
moment in the past, when God was actually present, 
when the supremacy of love, and the eternal beauty 
of a life devoted to its service were as plain as any 
visible thing could be. These absences of God are 
the testing points of life. Sooner or later they come 
to us all. Has it not often seemed to you a hard 
thing that the spiritual world should have faded out 
of sight at the very moment when you have a difh- 
cult part to play, and your need of the divine pres- 
ence is at its greatest? And yet we are not so far 
from the spiritual world as we think. Christ was 
never nearer to God than when he cried out on the 
Cross, ““My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken 
me?’ None but a loyal spirit could feel such de- 


THE PARABLE OF THE ABSENCE OF GOD 23 


spair, and when that point is reached we know that 
the unseen helpers, absent for the moment, are hur- 
rying back to the support of the soul which has kept 
the faith in the hour of desolation and loneliness. 
Learn then to bear the absences of God. They are 
part of the divine discipline. 

Let us learn to be content with a life which is 
visited occasionally only by this travelling Master 
whose divine purposes we serve. The continual pres- 
ence of the spiritual realities, in all their beauty, in 
all their majesty, in all their insistence, is doubtless 
what we all desire; but such a state of things would 
leave no room for the free and loyal service which is 
at once our duty and our joy. To have no option 
but to serve the highest; to be forced in spite of 
ourselves to acknowledge its presence and to yield to 
its demands, that would not be the kind of education 
that is needed to turn us into the children of the 
light. We need these absences of God, these long 
intervals when the light has to be kept burning in 
darkness, and the trust has to be kept against all 
solicitations to betray it. They qualify us for that 
high and glorious moment when the Master returns, 
as most assuredly he will do in his own good time. 
The loyalty which can keep the trust under these 
conditions is the very service which the divine spirit 
asks of us all. 

Perhaps you remember years ago listening to some 
great preacher whose message touched you to the 
quick and opened the heavens for you and made you 
feel that God was near you, your saviour and friend. 
“Ah,” you say, “if only I could have heard a sermon 
like that every Sunday, how much better a man I 


24 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


should have been.” But no; that great preacher 
passed out of your life, he faded away into the dim 
distance and you never heard that message again. 
Only once! 

Or there was a day in your life when you stood 
alone amid the beauty and glory of the natural 
world; you gazed into the depths of the starry firma- 
ment above your head; you saw the mountains and 
the ocean; you heard the great deeps calling to one 
another; and then the feeling came over you, and 
the conviction sank into your heart, that the whole 
universe was alive with God. ‘Ah,’ you say, “if 
only that experience had been more frequent, what 
a religious man I should have become. But no. I 
returned to my business; I sank back into my rou- 
tine; I resumed the commonplace, and that feeling 
has never visited me since that day.’’ Only once! 

Or something more intimate. Once there was a 
dear soul beside me, whose touch upon my life kept 
me true to my better self. But death came; the tie 
was broken and I was left alone. “There has been 
no other like that one. There never has been, there 
never can be! Only one, and that one passed away 
from me into the depths of the everlasting silence! 
How far away the country is into which my king- 
dom of heaven, once so near, has travelled!’ 

Such are the ways of the Master of our life. 
These were his visits. He will come again, perhaps 
when the light is sinking and the world slipping 
from your grasp. But another light will be dawning, 


And with the morn those angel faces smile 
Which I have loved long since and lost awhile. 


THE FAITH OF A SOLDIER 
DEAN CHARLEs R. Brown, Yale University 


How narrow we are in picturing the saints! We 
usually paint them in long white robes with halos 
around their heads, giving them a setting altogether 
celestial, as if they were too good for this common 
earth. We put them in the clouds, when they are 
needed most on the ground. 

The Master was wiser. He knew what was in 
man and was not misled by any shallow conventions. 
Here in my text he lifts a man into renown for all 
time as a man of marvelous faith! “I have not 
found such faith, no, not in Israel.” And to our 
surprise the man was not a priest or a prophet, he 
was a layman, a soldier. In our day he would have 
been in khaki. He comes upon the scene, crosses the 
stage just once, and then disappears. But in those 
brief moments he does that which causes him to be 
remembered. Look at him—he has something to 
say! 

Notice first the fine quality of his nature! He 
stood four square and his four main traits are here 
set down. He was a man who did his duty as nat- 
urally and as regularly as a horse eats oats. “I am 
a man under authority,” he said. He had his orders 
and he obeyed them. He had not been bitten by that 

25 


26 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


fad which is forever talking about being “left free 
to live its own life,” yielding instantly to any passing 
impulse. He would have made short work of that 
sort of folderol. He did certain things because they 
were right, spurned certain things because they were 
wrong—and that was all there was about it in his 
soldierly mind. For all meanness he showed a scorn 
as fierce and as clean as fire. 

“T am a man under authority,” he said, “and I 
have soldiers under me. I say to one ‘go’ and he 
goes; to another ‘come’ and he comes; to another “do 
this’ and the thing is done.” He was orderly and 
thorough in his whole method of life, like the power 
of gravitation. When the clock struck he was there 
on time, not with a string of excuses, but with the 
task accomplished. How this must have warmed the 
heart of him who said, ‘‘Not every one that saith, 
‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter into the kingdom, but he 
that doeth the will of my Father.” 

He was a broad-minded man, without a petty, 
bigoted hair in his head. He was an officer in the 
Roman army, stationed in Palestine where his deal- 
ings were mainly with the Jews. He saw that their 
main interest was religion, and he respected their 
worship even when he did not share in it. The 
Jews in that small place were poor and he had built 
them a synagogue. This generous action of a 
Roman Centurion in providing them a decent place 
of worship touched their hearts. When this officer 
came to Christ with his request, a committee of 
the elders of the congregation came with him. 
“He is worthy,” they said, “for whom thou shouldst 
do this thing. He loveth our nation and hath 


THE FAITH OF A SOLDIER 27 


built us a synagogue.” He was built on broad 
lines. 

He was a humane man. He was in sound health 
himself, apparently, as soldiers usually are, but he 
had at home a sick slave. ‘My servant lieth at home 
sick of the palsy, grievously tormented.” It was 
not an age of kindness—one sick slave more or less 
what did it matter whether he lived or died? Slaves 
were cheap. But this man had a heart. He did not 
make any direct request of the Master, but the tones 
of his voice as he made his statement were pleading 
like angels on behalf of that sick slave. 

He was a man of reverence, as all of the best 
officers are. He knew about this teacher of religion 
who forgave men’s sins and healed their diseases. 
When he had laid the case of the sick slave before 
Christ, Jesus said, “I will come and heal him.” 
No hesitation, no uncertainty—He spoke as one 
having the power. His plain, straight word touched 
the heart of this soldier. “I am not worthy,” he 
said, “that thou shouldst come under my roof. 
Speak the word only and my servant will be healed.” 
He stood there in the presence of Christ in the atti- 
tude of attention, with his hand at salute, doing 
reverence to one who impressed him as having come 
from God. 

How fine it all was! He was an officer and a 
gentleman. He honored the uniform he wore, the 
banner under which he served, the country for whose 
defense he stood. He was reliable, broad-minded, 
kindly and reverent. We can understand how the 
Master’s heart went out to him instantly. Here was 
a man who was a man indeed. 


28 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


In the second place, how did this high-minded 
man show that faith? He did it by his readiness to 
act upon the bare word of Christ. He stood there 
looking into the eyes of the Master and he felt that 
he had found one who could be trusted. Jesus spoke 
as one who knew what he was talking about. He 
impressed the Roman officer as one who would keep 
his word. He had undoubtedly healed others and 
he had shown a ready sympathy for that sick slave. 
When he said, therefore, “I will come and heal him,” 
that settled it in the mind of this soldier. 

The Roman officer was not accustomed to argue 
or handy words with his men. When he said “go” 
the man went. That was the way he felt about the 
word of Christ. “Speak the word only and my 
servant will be healed.’”’ No rhapsodies, no ecstacies, 
no moist gestures of the eyes or shouting of hallelu- 
jahs! His faith declared itself in that firm persua- 
sion that in the outcome it would be just as Jesus 
had said. And the Master called that attitude of 
heart, faith of the first order. 

You may hear it said of some pious soul, “He is a 
man of wonderful faith. He believes every word 
in the Bible from lid to lid. He accepts all the state- 
ments in the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, 
the Athanasian Creed and the Westminster Confes- 
sion without the least wobble of a doubt. Wonder- 
ful faith!” 

But all that has to do with theological opinion 
rather than with faith. It may or may not be ac- 
companied by religious faith. “The devils also 
believe,” the Bible says—they believe and tremble. 
They are just as orthodox as they can be, but they 


THE FAITH OF A SOLDIER 29 


remain devils. “With the heart man believeth unto 
righteousness.”’ We are not told anything about 
this soldier’s theological opinions. I do not know 
whether he believed in the Virgin Birth or the 
Second Coming or predestination or not—the record 
doesn’t say. His faith lay in his readiness to move 
ahead upon the word of Christ as furnishing a sound 
basis for action. 

How this aspect of a vital faith fits into the pre- 
vailing mood of our own day! Here is Jesus Christ 
building himself into the thought and life of the 
world as no other single individual ever has! All 
the leading nations of earth date their calendars 
from the year of his birth. “Nineteen Hundred 
and Twenty-five,” we say—it is just that long since 
he was born in Bethlehem of Judea! 

Here he stands uttering his message in the ears 
of the race! He did not argue about God or specu- 
late or express the hope that possibly there might be 
such a being. He proclaimed Him and manifested 
Him. “Iam not alone,” he said, “the Father is with 
me. He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” 
He caused the men who companied with him to feel 
sure of God. 

He did not argue about prayer, suggesting that 
possibly it might do some good. He prayed himself 
with such assurance that the men who heard him 
crept up and said, “Lord, teach us to pray.” They 
felt that they would rather learn to do that as he did 
it than anything else they could name. He said, 
“Ask and you will receive; seek and you shall find; 
knock at the door of a world unseen and that door 
will open.” And the men who heard him say it went 


30 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


to their knees in a venture of faith. This was his 
method from start to finish. 

Now faith is the feeling that in all this he knew 
what he was about. Faith is the response which our 
hearts make to those great verities which he pro- 
claimed. It is the reply we make to God and duty, 
to prayer and redemption, to the hope of future life 
and to the appeal of the coming kingdom, in terms 
of action. If we stand in the presence of these high 
claims allowing the best that is in us to answer back 
in trust and obedience, in aspiration and high re- 
solve, we show ourselves men of faith. We are 
ready to move out along the line Jesus suggested, 
feeling sure that it will be just as he said it would 
be. This is the way that soldier showed his faith— 
“Speak the word,” he said, “and I shall know that 
the thing is just as good as done.” Faith is the act 
of giving substance to things hoped for. 

“Sanity,” some one has said, “is the ability to 
interpret properly sense environment.” The sane 
man sees things as they are and calls them by their 
right names. “Godliness is the ability to interpret 
properly spiritual environment.” The pure in heart 
see God and they call Him by his right name. They 
call Him, “Our Father who art in heaven.” The 
pure in heart see Him because in their own pure 
hearts they have something to see him with. Spir- 
itual things are spiritually discerned. And obedi- 
ence, as that chivalrous soul in Brighton said many 
years ago—“QObedience is the organ of spiritual 
knowledge.” Our knowledge grows from more to 
more as we act consistently upon the word of Christ 
in the spirit of an obedient faith. 


THE FAITH OF A SOLDIER 31 


Take these claims of religion into the laboratory 
and test them for yourself by personal experiment. 
Say to those habits and moods which have no right- 
ful place in your life, “Go!” Say to those finer qual- 
ities of mind and heart which you feel you ought 
to possess, “Come!” Say to your sense of duty, “Do 
the thing which ought to be done.’”’ And somehow 
when you begin to act with that sense of command 
in the spirit of a soldier’s faith, your various facul- 
ties will fall in and obey orders. They will line up 
for action and you will move forward into victory 
all over the field. 

When the Battle of Obdurman in Egypt was 
fought, the British troops under Kitchener were 
outnumbered three to one by the Dervishes. The 
masses of Arabs, fanatical and furious in 
their mistaken zeal, flung themselves again and 
again upon the hollow squares of English 
soldiers as if by the sheer force of superior 
numbers and desperate courage they could drive 
them back. 

But every charge they made was repulsed. What 
did it? Not bravery alone, nor good guns alone! 
Never was there more desperate courage shown than 
that of the Arabs and they too had good guns. The 
battle was won by the power of discipline and of 
moral faith. The British soldiers knew that they 
could depend upon one another and upon their com- 
mander. They too were men under authority, ac- 
customed to obey. A certain percentage of them 
would be killed but the battle would be won, the 
Dervishes would be driven back, Khartoum would 
be retaken and order restored on the upper Nile. 


32 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


This is the victory that overcometh the world, even 
our faith. 

The religious man like this soldier in Galilee is a 
man under authority. He knows the value of disci- 
pline; he has learned to obey. The chemist in his 
laboratory is a man under authority. He acts 
habitually in obedience to the chemical laws which 
have been discovered. He knows that there is no 
other path of progress. The electrical engineer 
enters the power house where there are live wires 
of high voltage stretched about, as a man under 
authority. He walks about unhurt and does his 
work with peace of mind because he obeys the laws 
which govern those forces. 

The same sound principle holds true all the way 
up. If you would learn to live safely and usefully, 
joyously and endlessly, learn to live in obedience to 
‘that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. 
Your faith in Him and in all the forces and values 
for which He stands, will add cubits to its stature as 
you learn to live in fellowship and co-operation with 
Him, 


THE SPIRIT OF FEARLESSNESS AND 
REVERENCE 


Dr. Witt1AmM P. Merritt, New York City 


“When ye pray, say, Father, Hallowed be Thy name.”—— 
Luke xi. 2. 


The greatest religious teacher the world has 
known is here giving his most important lesson. 
Jesus is teaching his followers how to pray; not 
merely his immediate personal disciples, who sat at 
his feet and heard his word; but his followers down 
to the end of time. He must have realized the 
solemn importance of the act. Some of us feel very 
sure that, with his divine insight, he knew that far 
along through the centuries men and women would 
turn to that prayer as to one of their most precious 
possessions. What should be the opening petition? 
What is the very first thing we should desire and 
ask for when we pray? It would be interesting 
could each one here be caught in an unguarded 
moment, and suddenly brought to say what he would 
ask first, if his heart should speak to God impul- 
sively, without a chance for the mind’s reflection. 
Would it occur to any of us to put first what Christ 
put first? 3 

“Hallowed be Thy name.” That is what he 
deemed worthy of being made the opening petition 

33 


34 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


of his prayer and ours. “After this manner pray 
ye,” said he. And the first words of that directing 
prayer are, ‘Father, hallowed be Thy name.” 

The men to whom he spoke would be less sur- 
prised than we are to have the place of prominence 
given to such a petition. The Jews of that day had 
a high sense of the dignity of the divine name, and 
of the importance of keeping it holy. Indeed, so 
careful were they in their dealing with the covenant 
name of their God that no one today knows just 
how it should be spelled or pronounced. The word 
“Jehovah” is only an imperfect and clumsy repre- 
sentation of it. 

To men brought up in a spirit of abnormal and 
superstitious respect for the divine name, it would 
not seem strange that the opening petition of the 
model prayer should be an expression of earnest 
desire that God’s name might be kept holy. 

But is that why Jesus began his prayer in that 
fashion? Was he falling in with the ways and 
thoughts of his age, trying to perpetuate the slavish 
fear of God which made men afraid to speak his 
name? 

Such a motive could find no place in his soul. 
Such a teaching could find no place in his prayer. 
Even earlier in the prayer comes a phrase which 
emphatically negatives such a notion. “When ye 
pray, say, FATHER.” That was the strongest and 
most original teaching of the Master about praying. 
For all the many names of God, spoken or unspoken, 
high-sounding or simple, he substituted one name, 
the simple, common, homely word “Father.” Let 
that blessed word replace all others, that blessed 


FEARLESSNESS AND REVERENCE 35 


conception fill all their hearts as they prayed to God 
or thought of him. Nor is it only in prayer that 
they are to be mindful of this great truth. They 
are to live their whole lives as in their Father’s 
home and presence. 

No! Jesus was not falling into the superstitious 
carefulness of the scribes of his day, when he set as 
the first petition in the model prayer the words, 
“Hallowed be Thy name.” No interpretation of 
that phrase can be admitted for a moment which 
tends to lessen the simplicity and directness of our 
approach to God, wherein we freely call him 
FATHER. “When ye pray, say, Father, Hallowed 
be Thy name.” 

What then is the lesson? It becomes more clear 
when we keep in mind the perfectly obvious fact 
that Jesus here links the two thoughts together— 
the calling God “Father,” and the keeping his name 
holy. It is as if he said, Get rid of the aloofness, 
lay aside the superstitious awe that fears to speak 
the name of God! Call him by the commonest name 
affection knows! Give him a name out of the home- 
life, and let that name be above every name. Draw 
near to God without fear, as a child comes to a dear 
and loving parent. But in losing the awe, see that 
you preserve true reverence. In laying aside the 
superstition, see that you do not lose the spirit of 
worship. There is a familiarity which breeds con- 
tempt. Be careful lest your freedom degenerate into 
that! Use the simplest, commonest name for God; 
and then hallow that name! Be intimate with God, 
but be reverent also. Love him so much, that you 
will respect him the more. When you pray, say, 


86 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


“Father,” but then let your first thought, your in- . 
stinctive desire take shape in the petition, “Hal- 
lowed be Thy name.” 

When we take it in that way, this opening peti- 
tion of the Lord’s Prayer begins to seem worthy of 
its place of prominence. It is no echo of the 
thoughts of that ancient time. It is more like a 
word of eternal wisdom, fitted especially to this day 
in which you and I are living, and trying to be at 
once human and godly. What is there we need more 
than this spirit which says, “Father, hallowed be 
Thy name’’? this combined intimacy and reverence, 
this blending of fearlessness and veneration, this 
power to make God and life and all things common, 
and yet keep them holy? 

To get the full force of this teaching, we must 
remember that whenever the Master talked of God, 
or religion, or prayer, or worship, he was not think- 
ing of a little realm shut off, set apart from common 
life. He saw life whole, and meant that we should. 
LIFE was what interested him, not a section of it. 
Religion to him was just one’s attitude toward life. 
God was the Power, the Wisdom, the Reality, all 
through life. Prayer was our contact with that 
reality. He made no separation between things holy 
and things secular, not because to him all was sec- 
ular, but because to him all was holy. And there- 
fore this teaching about prayer is a teaching about 
life. If we know how to pray, we know how to 
live; for prayer and life are one. So Jesus thought 
and taught. That is why he had scant use for the 
distinctions the Pharisees drew; why the Sabbath 
seemed to him like other days, and the Temple like 


FEARLESSNESS AND REVERENCE 37 


other places, and approach to God like other simple 
acts of social intercourse. There was a splendid 
symbolism about the rending of the veil when Jesus 
died. The holiest lay open. Henceforth, nothing 
was to be kept holy by being kept hidden. Let all 
come to the light and be judged! 

But let it all be holy! Call things by their right 
names, refuse to call anything holy just because it 
is kept dark! But let the names be sacred. Look 
at God, and life, and facts, and religion, and every- 
thing, with honest truthfulness and without fear; 
but never without reverence. Learn that the holy 
need not be uncommon; that the commonest word 
or fact or process may be sacred, should be counted 
sacred. 

So this prayer sends us to face life with com- 
bined fearlessness and reverence, with free minds 
and worshipful souls. What does this age of ours 
need more than this spirit in which freedom and 
reverence have equal sway? Thus to pray “Father, 
hallowed be Thy name” guards us against the two 
dangers to which we are especially liable—the 
danger on the one hand of a reverence which be- 
comes superstition and fear of facing facts; and on 
the other of a freedom which loses the beauty of 
holiness in making all things common. 

To the Hebrew mind, “Common” and ‘“‘Unclean” 
were synonyms. The “holy” was something set 
apart. Jesus came to do away with that distinction, 
that artificial holiness, and to teach the sacredness 
of the common. But he knew well the danger that 
men might make the holy common, and still count 
the common unclean. That is just what we tend to 


88 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


do. Therefore he rightly put reverence high, and 
made our first prayer a petition that God and life 
might be kept holy. 

We are living in a time which has caught the full 
swing of the spirit of fearfulness. Freedom is the 
keynote of all we say or do. We honor the spirit 
that looks facts in the face and calls them by their 
right names. The scientist is our hero, the man 
who sits down before some fact, prepared to follow 
it wherever it may lead, no matter what becomes of 
his traditions, or prejudices, or former ideas, no 
matter if his whole system of philosophy is upset. 
We handle all sorts of matters with fearless inti- 
macy and cheerful familiarity. Young people amaze 
us with their careless, frank handling of all sorts of 
matters, including some which were usually kept in 
the dark when some of us were young. They plunge 
through thickets which we carefully skirted. They 
calmly break the seals on many a package carefully 
marked “Tabu.” The Sabbath, the Bible, Prayer, 
Religion, Sex, Birth, Death—these are no longer 
kept on the shelf, to be taken out and handled only 
at set times by proper persons, and with great care. 
They are tossed from hand to hand, freely examined, 
frankly discussed. Everything is made common by 
much handling. 

Some very good people are very uneasy at all this. 
It seems to them that religion itself is weakening, 
that morality and modesty are lessening, that things 
cannot thus become common and not become un- 
clean. To their minds, if the veil of the temple is 
rent, the Shekinah vanishes. If science comes in 
with explanation, religion fades with the fading 


FEARLESSNESS AND REVERENCE 39 


of mystery. Where law is found, God is lost. 
Make a thing common, and it must cease to be 
holy. 

So it comes about that some Christians are mak- 
ing a determined, heroic, pathetic, hopeless stand 
against all new ideas and interpretations of life and 
of God; and for a blind acceptance of and insistence 
upon the old standards and thoughts. Never mind 
what science may say, or what the facts may seem 
to be; stand by the old ways of believing and living 
and thinking! Make all things common, and no 
religion is left! Stand for the Puritan Sabbath, or 
there remains no holy time. Insist on a Bible free 
from error, or you have no revelation of God! 
Admit the possibility that Jesus may have been born 
as other men are, and you abandon his divinity. 
Give up faith in any of the miracle stories in the 
Bible as literal accounts of actual happenings, and 
God fades away from the record. Accept the theory 
of Evolution as the best way yet found of account- 
ing for the world as we know it, and you make man 
only a developed beast. Such are the thoughts and 
words of many good men and women of our time, 
deeply concerned for the maintaining of true 
religion. 

There is cause for their concern. We are facing 
a grave danger, and we have not been sufficiently 
alive to it. One serious cause of the present up- 
rising of reactionary religion, one great reason for 
such strength as there is in the Fundamentalist 
movement, as it has come to be known, is to be 
found in the carelessness of many liberals as to 
religious and spiritual values. There are critics who 


40 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


handle the Bible as if it were a lot of old clothes 
and junk. There are psychologists who handle the 
soul of man as if it were a piece of wood. In too 
many cases familiarity has degenerated into con- 
tempt, fearlessness has become flippancy, curiosity 
has failed to be reverent, and facts have taken the 
place of God. We have let all things become com- 
mon, as Jesus did; but we have not made all things 
clean, as Jesus did. We have not let reverence grow 
along with knowledge. Too much, far too much, 
we have let the Sabbath become like our other days, 
instead of making all days holy to the Lord; we 
have been ready to admit that the Bible is much 
like other books, and that the men of God were much 
like other people; but we have too often done it in 
a way that means reducing the Bible and the saints 
to the level of coarse and ordinary living, when it 
should have meant seeing the glory of God all 
through human life and literature. We have han- 
dled freely sex and marriage and moral standards; 
but too often in a way that has made them less holy, 
not more pure and sacred. We have seen life in the 
light of an evolutionary process, and too much we 
have taken it to mean that man is more or less justi- 
fied when he behaves like the son of a brute. These 
tendencies to degrade all life to the level of the com- 
mon and unclean are very strong; and those are 
right who count it their Christian duty to resist 
them absolutely; to stand for the clean against the 
unclean; for morality against the immoral and the 
un-moral; for religion against irreligion and secu- 
larism; for the God in man against the beast in 
man. The whole Christian Church should stand like 


FEARLESSNESS AND REVERENCE 41 


a wall of rock against this whole flood of unclean- 
ness, this whole tendency to make life unholy by 
making it common. 

But, brethren, while we should and must make this 
stand, we shall lose always and utterly if we take 
any other way than the way of Jesus. Our Master 
would have none of the reactionary religion of his 
day. He threw the world open to his followers and 
said, “It is all your Father’s; and therefore it is all 
yours.” He left no place in his religion for tabus. 
He scandalized the religious leaders by the way he 
acted on the Sabbath. He so used the Scriptures in 
the synagogue at Nazareth that they tried to throw 
him from the cliff as a heretic. When appealed to 
for judgment as to the right place at which to wor- 
ship God, he said, “Neither in this mountain, nor at 
Jerusalem ; but wherever there is spirit and reality.”’ 
He stood for the open mind, for the whole view of 
life, for the sacredness of the common, for the God 
of daily life. Modern science is the legitimate child 
and heir of his spirit. The magnificent philosophy 
of evolution could have come to light only where 
Christ had taught the souls of men to look every- 
where for God and truth. We are taking his way 
when we face facts fearlessly, when we look at the 
great Reality back of all life, and gladly say, 
“Father” ; when we look at the wonder of the world, 
and say, ‘“‘Home.” The more common we make re- 
ligion and life and all, the nearer we are to the way 
of the Master. To divide life up into sections, label- 
ing one “sacred,” the other common’; to pack it 
into compartments, keeping the salt of religion in 
one box, while the rest of life goes to the bad for 


42 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


lack of that saving salt; that is to follow the Scribes 
and Pharisees, not the Lord of Life. 

But, if we would take the real way of Jesus, we 
must learn not only how to make all things com- 
mon, but how to keep the common holy. We must 
not let familiarity breed irreverence. With our fear- 
lessness must go a deep sense of the holiness of all 
life. If we see God less in special places, we must 
see him more clearly everywhere. 

This is what we need, what we must have—the 
spirit which sees, as Paul saw, that “all things are 
of God.” He alone can safely leave the shelter of 
little shrines, and restricted views of God, and tradi- 
tional codes and creeds and standards, who has 
caught a vision of the potential holiness of all life, 
so that still he worships the best, and takes the way 
of the highest. He only dares look up to the Lord 
of all life, and say “Father,” who instantly joins to 
that word the prayer, “Hallowed be Thy name!” 

Oh, what would it not mean if into the soul of 
the modern world, so fearless in facing facts, so 
boldly set on reality, so impatient at shams and half- 
truths—and in all this so like Christ himself— 
would come in full power the other half of the 
spirit of Jesus, a growing sense of the holiness of 
life, of the sanctity of common things and acts and 
relationships, of the nearness and glory of Cod; if 
reverence went always with fearlessness! It would 
mean a new day for the world. Democracy would 
be shorn of its perils, and set free in its glory; for 
it would cease to be a leveling down to the standard 
of the lowest, and would become a passionate and 
joyous faith in the essential and potential glory of 


FEARLESSNESS AND REVERENCE 43 


common human nature. We could become more 
democratic without losing reverence for law and 
authority. Religion would be what men need that 
it shall be, what Christ meant that it should be, a 
full and glad worship of the God of our life, a 
spirit that sees God everywhere, and walks with him 
in all things. We would touch and handle all good 
things, the Sabbath, the Bible, love, marriage, the 
home, the nation, beliefs, duties, God, life, with the 
free artless curiosity of the child, and yet with an 
ever-deepening reverence, a growing sense of holi- 
ness. We should live a wholesome life, at once nat- 
ural and holy. That is the life Christ meant us to 
live when he said, “Say, Father, Hallowed be Thy 
name!’ a life at once fearless and reverent. 

Too readily we fall into two opposing camps. 
The liberal is fearless, the conservative is reverent. 
Too often liberalism becomes an irreverent ration- 
alism, and conservatism a superstitious tradition- 
alism. It is hard to say which is further from the 
mind and spirit of Christ. It is useless to debate 
which is better or worse; for our business is to be 
neither better nor worse, but right; to be neither 
Pharisees, nor Sadducees, but Christians; Christians 
like Christ in the blending of intimacy with a sense 
of holiness, or fearlessness with reverence. Tenny- 
son caught the true ideal, caught it from the Master 
whom he loved, and in whose spirit he was so much 
at home. 


Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us dwell; 

That mind and soul, according well, 
May make one music as before ;— 


44 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


But vaster! We are fools and slight. 
We mock Thee, when we do not fear; 
But help Thy foolish ones to bear, 

Help Thy vain worlds to bear Thy light. 


That should be our ideal. “Let knowledge grow 
from more to more.” Send the human mind to 
range freely and boldly among all facts. Do not 
fear the advance of scientific thought and knowl- 
edge! Welcome it as a way of knowing better the 
truth about life and God. But, as knowledge grows, 
let “more of reverence in us dwell.” -So only can 
come that ‘“‘vaster music” for which we long, when 
all the varying strains of this rich, wonderful mod- 
ern life of ours shall be caught up into one great 
new song of praise to the God who is our life. 

One of our modern teachers has set in a simple 
phrase the true spirit which should be in us all: 
“We are not afraid to open our eyes in the presence 
of nature, nor ashamed to close our eyes in the pres- 
ence of God.” The religion for which the world 
waits today is this blend of fearlessness and rever- 
ence. And that will be our spirit, if we learn from 
our Master, when we pray, and when we live, and 
all through our days and ways, ever to say, “Father, 
Hallowed be Thy name!’ 


THE HEAVENLY VISION 


BisHop WILLIAM F. ANDERSON, 
Boston, Massachusetts 


“Whereupon, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto 
the heavenly vision.”——Acts xxvi. 10. 


Blessed in their ministry to their generation are 
those who catch the vision of heavenly things and 
who throw that vision upon the dusty pathway of 
our common life. They are ever delivering us from 
the domination of the material and exalting before 
our eyes the spiritual values. These are they who 
keep faith alive in the earth and without faith it is 
impossible to please God. Except for their ministry 
and contribution all life would inevitably deteriorate. 
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” This 
truth from the old world holds at full face value for 
every interest in our modern life. One of the most 
distinguished scientists has recently said that “‘the 
most important thing in the world is our belief in 
the reality of moral and spiritual values.”’ To make 
men believe this and proceed upon it as basic in 
all their operations is the only hope of progress 
toward a better world. 

Modern civilization should lay this great truth to 
heart. The mastery of mind over matter is one of 
the most notable achievements of the modern world 

45 


46 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


and because of this men have been boasting much of 
the superiority of our own times in comparison with 
the past. It is true that distance has been eliminated 
and that the forces resident in the universe by the 
magic mastery of mind have been made to contribute 
to the enrichment, the enlargement, the comfort and 
the convenience of human life in a remarkable 
fashion. But when we come to examine the ethical 
qualities and practices of modern world progress it 
is quite another matter. Life does not consist in 
automobiles and telephones and luxurious habits and 
limited trains and radio communications. The ele- 
ments of our life in their final analysis are not mate- 
rial but moral and spiritual. ‘Man liveth not by 
bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out 
of the mouth of God.” The question as to the 
desirability and probable durability of the modern 
world order is being raised very frequently in these 
days. The questioning comes many times from the 
Orient where spiritual values receive high considera- 
tion. One of our own popular writers has recently 
set forth a characteristic condition of modern indus- 
try under the title “The Man in the Glass Cage.” 
The writer makes a visit to this man and finds him 
engaged in doing a certain piece of work automati- 
cally day in and day out, year in and year out. 
When the man is questioned as to the joy that he 
finds in his toil he seems dazed and confesses that 
he has but one motive back of his labor and that is 
to earna living. The idea of putting any personality 
into his daily toil is remote from his thinking. The 
exaltation of efficiency and mere system at the 
expense of the development of human personality 


THE HEAVENLY VISION 47 


cannot be squared with Christian standards. It is 
quite a general condition in many quarters of mod- 
ern commerce and industry. Too long we have 
been content with the individualistic triumphs of the 
Christian religion. In the new day dawning we 
shall all see that the world is the subject of redemp- 
tion and herein lies the hope of the future. 

To persuade the leaders of modern civilization 
that the most important thing in the world is a belief 
in the moral and spiritual values is an undertaking 
to which the prophets and servants of God must set 
themselves with whole-hearted consecration. It will 
prove a very wholesome exercise for us to scrutinize 
more thoughtfully our ethical standards which have 
come to be taken for granted. 

Our long-time assumed Anglo-Saxon superiority 
is being challenged. And rightly so. It has been a 
breeder of race prejudice and race hatred, which 
feelings are utterly contradictory to the Christian 
spirit and life. The rising world-tide of race con- 
sciousness must be met in the days near at hand. 

Woe betide us if we attempt to deal with it in 
any other way than by the Christian method <A 
new set of circumstances is carrying us forward to 
the recognition of the solidarity of the human race. 
Our God marches onward and by various methods. 

We must admit that the standards of our own 
country fall short in many particulars. While many 
of the nations in Europe are on the verge of bank- 
ruptcy, our wealth has been increasing with mar- 
velous rapidity. It is stated that the wealth of the 
United States has doubled since 1912. We are 
growing dangerously rich. Unless we are on our 


48 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


guard we shall become disgracefully rich. It was 
reported at the recent meeting of the Bankers’ Asso- 
ciation held in Chicago that the deposits in the Sav- 
ings Banks alone the past year equaled all the 
banking business of the country ten years ago. This 
vast wealth placed in the hands of the American 
Republic is sure to increase largely in the days 
ahead. If opportunity is another word for responsi- 
bility, then the leaders of our own country will do 
well to consider our responsibility towards nations 
less fortunate and less resourceful than our own. 


Ill fares the land, 

To hastening ills a prey 
When wealth accumulates 
And men decay. 


What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the 
whole world and lose his own soul? What shall it 
profit a nation if it shall gain the whole world and 
lose its own soul? What shall it profit the American 
Republic if it shall gain the whole world and lose its 
own soul? The American Republic is in imminent 
danger of losing its soul. It is imperative that the 
heavenly vision should be cultivated. The birth of 
our nation came out of that heavenly vision which 
our founders caught and which held them spellbound 
in the early days of our national history. 


America! America! 

God shed His grace on thee 

And crown thy good with brotherhood 
From sea to shining sea! 


What a boon it would be if the building of the 
life of the local communities of this land could pro- 


THE HEAVENLY VISION 49 


ceed with due recognition of the heavenly vision and 
its meaning for corporate welfare! Here lies pre- 
eminently the mission and ministry of the true 
prophet. Most of our communities proceed upon the 
basis that the chief resources are in the material 
values, in the quality and productivity of its soil, in 
the richness of its deposits, in the salubriousness of 
its climate; whereas the supreme assets in any com- 
munity are found in the development of its young 
life under the inspiration of the heavenly vision. 
No voice counts for so much for ultimate welfare in 
the formative period of any community, rural, 
urban or suburban as the voice of the man who 
speaks in behalf of God and godly values. Due 
emphasis upon proper educational methods and 
ideals and real leadership in the establishment of 
inspirational standards and institutions count far 
more in the long run than any material values which 
may be regarded as contributions to the community 
life. 

There are notable indications that many people 
of our own times are ready to respond to a new and 
stronger emphasis upon spiritual values and spir- 
itual leadership. Never was there a greater day for 
the true prophet of God than our own day. Dis- 
cerning minds are seeing that materialism will not 
suffice. This fact should be made the basis of pro- 
cedure by all true leaders in our own times. We are 
far in arrears in our spiritual achievements, but 
everywhere there is quick response to spiritual em- 
phasis. Let us not forget it. Let us rather thank 
God and take courage. 

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” 


50 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


This truth holds pre-eminently for the life of every 
man if he seeks to attain the highest and best in 
character and in service. The heavenly vision of 
spiritual reality is the most determining thing that 
can come into a man’s life. 

And here let us be grateful for that providential 
arrangement of life which makes the mind of youth 
so susceptible to spiritual reality and spiritual ideals. 
This is the inspiration of one of the noblest poems 
in the English language—Wordsworth’s Ode on the 
Intimations of Immortality: 

Not in entire forgetfulness 
And not in utter nakedness 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 


From God, who is our home. 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy. 


Blessed be the men who take care in the midst 
of the crash and crush of the strenuous demands 
of such a day as ours to cultivate and be always 
conscious of the fact that Heaven is our environment, 
not only in the days of infancy but through the 
development of early manhood on through the noon- 
day and afternoon and evening of our natural life. 

A great captain of industry bore this testimony 
regarding his experinece during the War. “I have 
had to fight day and night to keep my business from 
going to wreck and ruin. Never since I entered 
upon business have I found it necessary to live so 
constantly with my business. I do not know whether 
I shall ever be able to rescue my soul again or not.” 
He is not the only man who has had to fight for his 
soul. Many a man has had a like experience. To 
preserve the soul-life in the midst of a day like this 


THE HEAVENLY VISION 51 


and in a country like ours is a real problem for 
many of us. Who has not felt it? 

The cultivation of the childlike spirit will be very 
helpful in attaining this result. Note the difference 
between childishness and childlikeness. Childishness 
is that state of mind which every man should out- 
grow. As St. Paul said—‘‘When I was a child I 
spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought 
as a child: but when I became a man, I put away 
childish things.’’ The excessive love of things, of 
enormous wealth or of any earthly good is really a 
species of childishness. Every form of selfishness 
is childishness. It is the mark of a real man to lose 
self and self-interest for the common weal. 

But childlikeness is an entirely different thing. 
It is the susceptibility to spiritual teaching and spir- 
itual leading—an open-mindedness towards all spir- 
itual truths, readiness to believe in God and in the 
worlds which are spiritual and not material. It is 
to be able to claim the blessing of the first beatitude, 
“Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the 
Kingdom of heaven.” Here is a real problem for 
every one of us. The neglect of the claims of the 
heavenly vision means death to a man’s very being. 
That was a serious warning of the Master—‘“If the 
light that is in thee be darkness how great is that 
darkness?’ For any man to hold the heavenly 
vision in light esteem means atrophy—certain death. 
Indeed, I regard that as the “unpardonable sin’ 
referred to in the Scriptures. In view of the teach- 
ings of Christ, I cannot believe that there is any sin 
for which the grace of God as revealed in Him is 
not sufficient, so far as its judicial treatment by God 


52 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


is concerned. But when any man disregards and 
despises the heavenly vision he commits a sin against 
his own being which in the very nature of the case 
cannot be atoned for so far as its effect upon his 
own life is concerned. It is an unpardonable sin 
against God because it is an inestimable injury to 
God’s child created in his own likeness. Any man 
who commits a great sin against himself thereby 
sins greatly against’God. This truth should make 
every man fear and tremble. St. Paul could say 
that he had not been disobedient unto the heavenly 
vision. He had once been the avowed enemy of 
Jesus of Nazareth and an intense persecutor of his 
followers, but after his experience on the Damascus 
road he was ever under the domination of the 
heavenly vision. Ever thereafter he was pleased to 
call himself the slave of Jesus Christ. The term 
which he uses in referring to himself in many of his 
Epistles is the old Greek word for slave. Contem- 
plate now for a moment the fruitage as the result 
of his obedience to the heavenly vision and let every 
one of us lay the lesson seriously to heart and under- 
stand that in proportion as we follow the gleam and 
become obedient unto the heavenly vision our lives 
will gather to themselves fruitage which will honor 
God and bless mankind. 

That heavenly vision came to Paul the day he 
heard the voice of the Living Christ. From that 
day until the end of his great career the cultivation 
of that vision became the passion of his life. It is 
for every man of us, inspired by his great example, 
to go and do likewise. 


TREASURE TROVE 


, 
Dr. RicHarD Roserts, Montreal, Canada 


“The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a treasure hidden 
in a field, which a man found.”——Matthew xiii. 44. 


Like a good many of the intellectuals of her time, 
George Eliot gave up religion; but unlike some, she 
did it with comparative ease. When her life was 
written and the story of her abandonment of religion 
told, Hutton, then editor of the Spectator, a very 
great man, said about it this: “To me the remarkable 
point is that George Eliot felt herself relieved of a 
burden rather than robbed of a great spiritual main- 
stay by the change.” When I read this the other 
day I recalled the very different story of another 
great Victorian who was led to renounce his religion. 
This was George Romanes, a notable scientist. 
After showing why scientific candour compelled him 
to give up religion, he goes on: “I am not ashamed 
to confess that with this virtual negation of God the 
universe to mé has lost its soul of loveliness .. . 
When at times I think (as think at times I must) of 
the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of 
that creed which once was mine and the lonely mys- 
tery of existence as I now find it—at such times I 
shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the sharpest pang 
of which my nature is capable.” George Eliot cast 

53 


54 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


off a burden; George Romanes lost a pair of wings. 
The novelist left religion for what she thought was 
light and freedom; the scientist left religion to face 
desolation. It shows some defect in us if we can- 
not admire the noble courage of that renunciation 
and do not descry in it the germ of a clearer faith 
which might later (as indeed it did) bring this rare 
mind back into the sunlight. 

It is the tragedy of religion that it may become 
a burden, that it may fade into a dull drab thing. 
Most things that we live with all the time tend to 
lose their lustre ; and religion may from sheer custom 
lose its “first fine careless rapture.” It declines into 
a round of observances that retain not even a mem- 
ory of their original glamour. It no longer com- 
mands us as it did; we compel ourselves to attend 
to it. It is useless to pretend that we have not in 
our time reached this condition ; however we explain 
it, most people nowadays find religion as dull as 
ditchwater. 

Yet in the New Testament, religion and the 
things that appertain to it are regarded as matters 
of high romance. It is an affair of surprises and 
of daily miracle. It is treasure found in a field; 
it is finding the pearl of great price; it is the home- 
coming of a lost child, the rescue of a wandering 
sheep. It is uprooting sycamine trees and moving 
mountains. It is wonder and adventure; it is build- 
ing a, city and waging a war; it is a race and a 
wrestling match. And if our religion was this at 
the start, a thing of epiphanies and grand excite- 
ments, why has it become tedium, and weariness and 
boredom? Why is it that the thing that to George 


TREASURE TROVE 55 


Romanes relieved the world of dulness and darkness 
should have become the dullest and the dimmest 
thing in it? 

I think it is partly the fault of the theologians, 
who have always been too ready to reduce religion 
to a system. They have been very busy defining it; 
and to define a thing is, as we know, to limit it. 
You mean to set up boundary lines, and you create 
a prison. When you have established an orthodoxy 
in religion, you have put religion in a halter. The 
creeds, which were meant to be the safeguards of 
religion against backsliding, have become hindrances 
to its growth. When you have so defined and sys- 
tematised religion that you have all its ideas and all 
its hopes, all its experiences and all its practices 
classified and labelled in a complete scheme, the next 
thing is the funeral service. Yet God has warned us 
against this danger by the most unmistakable signs. 
He has veiled Himself from us so that religion may 
not cease to be continual discovery; He has left us in 
a world bestrewn and encompassed with mystery 
lest we grow cocksure and arrogant in our pride of 
knowledge. Weare creatures of time and space; yet 
we confront the unknown, and our religion is our 
concern with that unknown. To define and delimit 
religion is as stupidly presumptuous as to draw a 
map of a continent because you once spent a little 
holiday on its shores. The greater part of life is 
still beyond our sight, and to presume that we have 
exhausted its meaning, as dogmatists of whatever 
stripe are apt to do, is to shut ourselves out for ever 
from the apocalypses and adventures which the 
Unknown is holding in trust for us. The crime of 


56 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


the credalist is that he kills the spirit of expectancy 
and pens up the impulse of exploration; and religion 
bereft of these is no more than a bad habit. 

We parsons are also partly to blame that religion 
is dull and tame. I say that, because if I do not say 
it, you will surely think it, and may think me dis- 
ingenuous. But I do not propose to wash profes- 
sional soiled linen in public. We are to blame for 
our conventionality, our professionalism, our poor 
sense of proportion, our fussiness about secondary 
things—and most of all, for our failure to live 
habitually among the deep things of God. But be- 
lieve me, while we shall have to answer for our 
failures, the rest of you will have something to 
answer for in respect of us. “Like priest, like 
people’’—that is true; but “like people, like priest” 
is no less true. We become what you expect us to 
be. Many a preacher has to fight for his soul against 
his congregation, sometimes against the very kind- 
ness of his people. Sometimes he is afraid of them, 
afraid to be wholly true to himself in his utter- 
-ances—remembering the wife and the bairns at 
‘home. Sometimes he is wearing out shoe-leather on 
the streets—having a congregation that insists on 
being hand-fed—when he ought to be in his study 
alone with God, searching and waiting for the Word. 
And so we become formal and conventional, re- 
spectable and timid and dull, God help us! And 
religion becomes a lame and nerveless thing in our 
hearts and on our lips. 

And then there is in all of us that entail of in- 
ertia which has been the drag upon life through all 
its evolution. There is a notable passage of Bergson 


TREASURE TROVE 57 


in which he tells how the advance of the animal 
kingdom has been hindered by the pull of the vege- 
table life. ‘However full, however overflowing the 
activity of an animal species may appear, torpor and 
unconsciousness are lying in wait for it. It keeps 
up its role only by effort.” And we have not yet 
outgrown this handicap. In us it appears as a tend- 
ency to “settle down,” as we say; to find the line of 
least resistance and to stick to it; to evolve a medi- 
ocre technique of living which enables us to survive 
respectably with a minimum of effort. There is a 
strain of the limpet in all of us; and it does not take 
much to rob us of whatever spring and resiliency 
there may be in our lives. We become creatures of 
routine; we fall into ruts; and the tragedy is that 
we become contented with it. And nothing in life is 
it harder to rescue from its grooves than religion. 
In these biological days, it should need no argument 
to show that a groove may be only another name 
for a grave. 

So between us all, religion has become a pale and 
anzemic counterfeit of itself, a dull thing of rules 
and prescriptions, of ceremony and formula, of me- 
diocre hopes and middling performances, the sanc- 
tion of a standardised morality and the temple of 
an incrusted faith. Yet the subject matter of 
religion consists of epiphanies and transfigurations 
and apocalypses. Its God is not an heirloom from 
the past but the Glory that comes to it out of the 
future, whose word concerning Himself is that He 
makes all things new. It is a world of surprise and 
wonder ; the realm of the unexpected and the unpre- 
dictable. The Kingdom of heaven is like unto 


58 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


treasure hidden in a field which a man found... . 
But our religion has not led us to any hidden 
treasure for a very long time. 

Now plainly there is something we have lost and 
which we shall have to find again. I know that re- 
ligion has been having a spell of foul treatment at 
the hands of the psychologists; but I cannot help 
the conclusion that they have failed to see the wood 
in their preoccupation with the trees. And when I 
turn from them to the calm sanity of Jesus of Naza- 
reth, | am reassured. I know that the psychologist 
who has discovered the secret of religion in a com- 
plex or what not has never seen religion. He has 
been looking at something else. But he and any 
other man may find it, if he chooses. The Kingdom 
of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field which a 
man found. .. . The trouble about hidden treasure 
usually is that we only hear of it; we never find it. 
But here is hidden treasure which a man found; St. 
Francis found it; Ceorge Fox found it; John 
Wesley found it; and I have known obscure folk 
who had found it and you knew it by the light in 
their eyes. And none of us need go without it. 

The Kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden 
in the field. The field, you notice. I do not know 
whether the definite article there is meant to suggest 
that it was the man’s only field—we know it was a 
rented field—and that the man was one of the small 
people with “three acres and a cow”; and that there- 
fore we are to infer that this Treasure is not the 
prize of the important or the learned or the con- 
spicuous. The obscure and the anonymous have an 
equal chance with the rest. That is true, anyhow. 


TREASURE TROVE 59 


But it is sure that the treasure was found in a field, 
in a quite commonplace and unromantic setting. 
The man had gone down to his ordinary day’s work; 
and he hit upon the treasure. It is a curious reflec- 
tion, and luminous withal, that we often come upon 
the great things of life when we are looking for 
something else. Roentgen discovered his ray, as it 
seems, almost by accident. Henri Poincaré, the 
mathematician, said that his most important mathe- 
matical solutions came to him not as the direct con- 
sequence of working out the mathematical process, 
but rose unbidden in his mind in odd times and 
places: but he makes it clear that this never hap- 
pened unless he had been previously working hard 
upon the problem. You may call up the subcon- 
scious or any other modern and recondite object of 
faith to explain these things. Being a somewhat 
old-fashioned person, I still suspect that the Spirit 
of God has something to do with them; aye, and 
with greater discoveries than these. God with His 
light and truth and love lies in wait for us along the 
common ways of life; His treasure is hidden in the 
field. Sir Launfal (in James Russell Lowell’s noble 
poem), after spending life and fortune seeking the 
Holy Grail, comes back home to find his Lord wait- 
ing for him at his castle gate—where He had been 
all the time. You do not need to go far afield to 
find the greatest things in life. You may see 


The traffic of Jacob’s ladder 
Pitched between heaven and Charing Cross-—— 


or Boston Common; and 


60 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


Christ walking on the waters, 
Not of Gennesaret but Thames—— 


or the Charles River. 

“Alas,” said Dr. L. P. Jacks recently, “that the 
ethic of Jesus should have become a New Testa- 
ment ‘problem’ ”’—of Jesus who said to the masons, 
“Raise your stone and I stand beneath it’; and to 
his fellow carpenters, ‘Split your timber and I am 
inside.” 

The Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden 
in the field which a man found . . . but he had to 
dig for it before he found it. Digging was his job; 
and [ have no doubt that he was digging earnestly, 
for when men hide treasure in the earth, they bury 
it deep. You need not go looking for a new job in 
order to make the grand discovery. The man who 
found the pearl of great price was already looking 
for fine pearls. You have your field; dig in it and 
go on digging in it for dear life; and one day you 
will find your treasure. Dig for dear life, I said; 
yes, that, literally. For the mistake that many of 
us make is that we dig only for bread and cheese, 
and we turn our adventure into a trade: when our 
trade should be our adventure. Or we dig for name 
or fame—for anything but for dear life. It is our 
modern heresy that we look to our work for a living 
and look elsewhere for our life. But our work is 
our way unto life. When we work merely to make 
a living or to make a fortune or to make a fame, 
we are diverting the business of life on to a siding 
where it may be permanently “stalled.” Work truly 
understood has a profound biological significance; 
it is for us men our task and share in the magnifi- 


TREASURE TROVE 61 


cent Odyssey of life. What we call the conquest of 
nature is only the latest phase of what life has been 
doing from “its first minute beginnings’’—pushing 
out its frontiers, enlarging its borders, extending its 
empire into unfamiliar regions beyond its known 
horizons. Religion itself is the thrust of life into 
the unknown; and both our religion and our work 
are bound together in the biological pilgrimage of 
mankind. And what our work is in the large 
biological sense, it is in little for the individual. 
Our work is exploration; every day’s work should 
be an adventure into the unknown, pushing out the 
boundaries of experiences and making new discov- 
eries, little ones, no doubt, but new—and discoveries. 
Oh, I know that in this imbecile civilisation there 
are men who have to do useless work, and some 
have to work under infamous conditions, and some 
have no work to do at all: and the grand traffic of 
life has been monstrously derailed. Yet it remains 
true that work is the travail by which life is winning 
to the Kingdom and the power and the glory. 

Yet work if it is to serve this end must be nobly 
conceived and excellently done, done, as I said, for 
dear life. The original Judaic doctrine of work was 
that it was a part of the curse that followed the 
Fall of Man: and it was only slowly that men gained 
a truer and a finer thought about it. But it came at 
at last. “My Father,’ so Jesus is reported to have 
said, “worketh hitherto and I work’’; and by that 
saying the tables were turned for good and all. 
Work once conceived as a curse is now proclaimed 
to be Godlike, a divine activity akin to worship. 
And it is the logic of this announcement that St. 


62 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


Paul carries to a fine conclusion in his counsel to 
servants: ‘Be obedient to your masters in singleness 
of heart, as unto Christ, not in the way of eye- 
service as men-pleasers, but as servants of Christ 
doing the will of God from the heart, with good 
will doing service as unto the Lord and not unto 
men.’’ High doctrine, to be sure; but the only doc- 
trine which makes work the occasion and the organ 
of life. Katherine Mansfield, a writer of stories, 
who died before her promise was realised but whose 
work will live for its exquisite craftsmanship, who 
laboured as few have done to perfect her style, 
shortly before her death spoke of her dissatisfaction 
with her stories: “There is not one of them,’ she 
said, “that I dare show to God.’ So to work, in 
that high spirit of honour toward the Highest, is 
the highway of vision (and does it not tell you why 
you have not seen a glint of hidden treasure these 
many days’); to work, as Kipling says they do in 
the painters’ paradise, when 


Only the Master shall praise us and only the Master shall 
blame, 

And no one will work for the money, and no one will work for 
the fame, 

But each for the joy of the working, and each in his separate 
star 

Shall draw the thing as he sees it, for the God of things as 
they are. 


When Professor Stewart Macalister was explor- 
ing the Mound of Gezer in Palestine he dug a trench 
across the mound; and as the trench went down 
through the strata of debris which one civilisation 
after another left behind it, he made discoveries 


TREASURE TROVE 63 


which enabled him to reconstruct the strange and 
various history that that spot had seen: and down 
at the very bottom he came upon an altar—which is 
a parable of more than one thing; but here and now 
of this: that we by faithful work do dig our own 
trenches across the mound of life and make dis- 
coveries . . . and at last come within hail of God. 
Your apocalypse may find you through a micro- 
scope; your epiphany may break upon you in your 
classroom or your office. The light that never was 
on land or sea may catch the cobbler at his last and 
the miner in the pit. Abt. Vogler sat at the organ 
and heard an unearthly music. The cook may hear 
the unutterable word, like Brother Lawrence, amid 
the clatter of dishes. 

What more then need I say? The rest is in your 
hands. The Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure 
hidden in a field . . . and that is what we are all 
looking for. That is the meaning of our discon- 
tents and our restlessness, our desire of the moth for 
the star, this hunger that no bread can satisfy, this 
thirst that no water can slake. There is a treasure 
hidden in my field; it is for me to find it. Then, 
as the Lord liveth, let me dig for it. And your 
search is your day’s work done for the Highest, 
your task offered as incense on the most exalted 
altar that you can conceive, your laborare being 
orare as well; seek with patience, with singleness of 
heart, day by day; oh, it may be for many days: 
and then at last, in an hour you know not, it hap- 
pens. The opaque crust of sense cracks, the clouds 
part, the veil is rent; and your adoring and aston- 
ished eyes see a great light . . . and you cry out, 


64 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


“Eureka! Wve found it! I’ve found it!’ You will 
not be able to say much about it, for the idioin has 
not been invented that can tell it. Now and again, 
you may see something that suggests it in the glory 
of a sunset; perhaps a phrase of Beethoven will 
recall it; you may feel it between the lines of a 
poem; you may hear it in the mystic overtone of a 
saying of Jesus: but what remains is this immovable 
conviction—Whereas I was blind, I did for one glo- 
rious moment see; and the world has never since 
been what it was. 

Which perhaps means that what you have found 
is yourself; or that you have yourself been found. 
You thought you were the hunter; what if after all 
you were the quarry? Perhaps you did not find the 
Treasure so much as the Treasure found you. Per- 
haps it was that God (knowing what He did) and 
you (not knowing what you were doing) were look- 
ing for each other, and at last, (happy soul! happy 
soul!) you met! 


THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL 


Dr. Oscar E. Maurer, New Haven, Connecticut 
“The mirage shall become a pool.’——Isaiah xxxv. 7. 


All of you have either seen or read of the optical 
phenomenon known as the mirage of the desert. It 
is the total reflection of an object which is out of 
sight, but the ocular reproduction of which is visible 
at a distance. A traveler over the desert suddenly 
sees a shimmering lake in the midst of which are 
lovely islands covered with palm trees. He sees men 
and animals moving about. The appearance is so 
deceptive that often travelers have perished because 
they have left their course and pressed toward the 
fancied lake in search of water. Then suddenly, it 
disappeared, leaving only burning, choking sands. 

This beautiful thirty-fifth chapter of Isaiah sings 
of the transformation of Israel from dearth and 
sterility to fruitfulness and abundance. But I want 
to take this one striking verse, today, and give it a 
wider application. “The mirage shall become a 
pool.” Mirage: that is synonymous with illusion 
and unreality. The pool: that stands for reality— 
something which can be experienced and appropri- 
ated, which we can take to ourselves. The prophecy 
comes as a great constructive promise. The mirage 

65 


66 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


shall become a pool. In the journey through life, 
illusion and unreality shall give way to surer and 
surer reality, and human experience is a fulfillment 
of the ancient prayer, “From the unreal lead us to 
the real.” 

Now, the first impulse of many a person who 
hears this promise will be to say rather bitterely: 
“That's a lie. It ought to be the other way ’round. 
The pool becomes a mirage. Things we believed in, 
values we trusted, turn out to be untrue. Instead 
of becoming more and more trustful as we grow 
older, we become more and more cautious. Things 
are not what they seem. 


The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherits, shall dissolve 

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life 

Is rounded with a sleep. 


How many people there are who have suffered 
disappointment and whose verdict is “Life is a joke. 
We've tried it and there’s nothing to it.” Every 
pastor, every counselor of others, has to face the 
fact of the disappointed man whose sense of the 
reality of moral values has faded, the man who 
sums up his experience by saying, “I’ve tried to be 
square and live honorably—and look where it has 
gotten me.’ Vanity of vanities—all is vanity. 
Nothing is what it seems to be. ‘The pool shall 
become a mirage. 

The text will impress another man in just the 
opposite way. He will say “That is a fact. It is 


THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL 67 


really true. The mirage does become a pool. It 
has done so in my own life. I’ve had my dream. 
Now it has faded. I’ve waked up, and the reality is 
deadly. The mirage was unreal but beautiful. The 
pool is real, indubitable, but the water is stale and 
noisome and full of unclean, creeping things. Give 
me back my dreams.” That is the rumination of 
the prisoner working away sullenly at his uninspir- 
ing task, with years of sentence still ahead of him. 
It is the rumination of most any person who Is pay- 
ing’ year after year for one mad act of folly, and 
it is a bitter cud—that reflection that when you 
finally do discover what life really is, you also 
conclude that it isn’t worth while. 

There are these temptations to cynicism, which- 
ever way you take the text, and every life must 
grapple with them: the temptation to believe that it 
makes no difference what you believe or do; that 
the outcome of life is illusion or else a reality that 
is worse than illusion. The natural conclusion of 
such a view is that you might as well enjoy your- 
self while you can—get what you can. Be happy 
while you live, you'll be a long time dead. Let us 
eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. It 
was cynicism that lay at the root of the temptation 
of Jesus in the desert, the temptation, “Get all you 
can out of this while you last.” That is the devil 
to which men still sell their souls. 

But there is still another sense in which we can 
take the text, the constructive sense in which the 
metaphor was intended. The course of life and 
experience 1s toward greater and greater reality. 
“The mirage shall become a pool.” 


68 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


When we take the verse in this constructive sense, 
let us think a bit about the mirage itself. When we 
have dwelt upon its illusion and unreality, we are 
bound to go a step further and admit that it has 
elements of reality in it. It is the reflection of a 
reality and can teach us something. Behind it— 
somewhere in space and time—there is a reality, or 
else there could be no reflection. The experienced 
traveler, who will not be misled, is at least cheered 
by the vision. For days and days perhaps, the bar- 
ren sand dunes have been all that he has seen, until 
it seems to him that there is nothing else in the 
world. And then the mirage swims on the horizon 
and he knows that somewhere behind the rim there 
is another kind of a world where there is life and 
verdure. 

Now, the equivalent of the mirage in personal 
experience is the dream, Let us not underestimate 
the value of the dream of life. It is full of un- 
reality, and yet, like the mirage, it has elements of 
reality. Itis often our clearest apprehension of the 
ideal. It is life’s desire putting itself into form. 
Weare mind painters, all of us, and some inner urge 
forces us to seize our brushes and lay the colors on 
the canvas of the imagination. And such dreams 
have power over the future. The dreamy-eyed lad, 
building castles in the fire, identifies himself with 
some of the heroes of whom he has been reading, 
and in his mind is fighting the world’s battles and 
righting the world’s wrongs. Some day he will 
carry out at least a part of that dream. It is the 
dream element that makes the story of Joseph and 
his brethren so fascinating to young and old alike. 


THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL 69 


The pioneer sees the forests cleared away, the 
swamps drained, he sees peaceful homes and farms, 
and little children walking along the roadside on 
their way to school. There is the dream of the 
statesman about freedom, the dream of the scholar 
about truth, the dream of the scientist for human 
improvement. There is the dream of Lincoln in 
the slave market in New Orleans. The dream may 
not be fully realized but it points the way to reality. 
And it has within itself the power to seek expression 
in reality. O, the power wielded by the dreamers 
of the world! The wilderness and the dry land 
shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice 
and blossom as the rose. 


They are the music-makers 

And they are the dreamers of dreams, 
Wandering by lone sea-breakers, 

And sitting by desolate streams; 
World-losers and world-forsakers 

On whom the pale moon gleams, 

Yet they are the movers and shakers 
Of the world forever, it seems. 


But after all, the thing we are really interested 
in is not the mirage but the pool. Life is a striving 
after reality, or it is nothing. Otherwise we are 
shadows pursuing shadows. The text is in line with 
normal experience. Life has a way about it of 
bringing us into touch with realities. When we 
have done our best, things may not turn out as we 
had planned, but if we have done our best there the 
work stands, and God will not overlook our inten- 
tions and purpose. The fact that our best plans and 
programs often go askew is a sad perplexity, espe- 


70 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


cially in life’s early working day. High-minded 
youth starts out to be very logical. Things must go 
according to a certain order. “Consistency” is the 
watchword. Maturity begins to see that there is a 
higher order than logic. Experience teaches the 
wisdom and necessity of adjustment. This does not 
mean compromise. It means revising our actions 
because of greater knowledge gained by greater 
experience. “When I was a child, I spake as a child, 
I thought as a child.” And Paul might have added, 
“When I was a young man, I spoke and thought and 
felt asa young man. Now that I am well on in life, 
I look upon things with the wisdom of maturity. 
But I have kept the faith. And I look not at the 
things which are seen, but at the things which are 
unseen, for the things that are seen are temporal, 
but the things which are unseen are eternal.” This 
wonderful, tumultuous fact of life, with its successes 
and failures, its heights and depths, its glories and 
its shame, its lights and shadows, leads us from the 
mirage to the pool. The dream has its power but 
after the dream comes the awakening, when there is 
real work to do. Every right-minded person ought 
to will to live, to live fully, to plunge into the stream 
instead of standing on the bank. That is what the 
cynic does. He stands on the bank criticizing the 
swimmers, and then when a wave comes along and 
sweeps him away, he feels wronged. ‘Life is a 
spectacle until a man has taken part in it. Death is 
a pageant until it has overshadowed a man’s own 
house. Love is a song, a dream, a rainbow until it 
has entered a man’s heart. And religion is a shadow 
until it has interwoven itself with a man’s soul.” 


THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL 71 


And finally, when the mirage has disappeared and 
we reach the pool, it is not necessarily full of bit- 
terness and salt. After all, the pessimist is in the 
minority. People, in the long run, do arrive at a 
reality which they are willing to call good. This 
does not mean that they have settled down into 
fatalism, believing that life is as it is, and you 
might as well make the best of it. It does not mean 
that they have escaped disappointment. A certain 
amount of disillusionment is good for us. But if 
they have kept themselves free from the corrosive 
sublimate of cynicism, if they have followed their 
spiritual desires, they finally reach the center and 
heart of life and get hold of realities which they 
know will not fail. 


When the anchors that faith has cast 
Are dragging in the gale, 

I am quietly holding fast 
To the things that will not fail. 


I know that right is right, 
That it is not good to lie, 

That love is better than spite, 
And a neighbor than a spy. 


I know that passion needs 
The leash of a sober mind; 

I know that generous deeds 
Some sure reward will find. 


In the darkest night of the year 
When the stars have all gone out 

That courage is better than fear, 
That faith is truer than doubt. 


And fierce though the fiends may fight, 
And long though the angels hide, 

I know that truth and right 
Have the universe on their side. 


72 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


And that somewhere beyond the stars 
Is a Love that is better than fate. 
When the night unlocks her bars 
I shall see Him and I will wait. 


These things are no mirage, no dream. We may 
lose hold of them for a moment, but our grasp will 
be all the firmer when we have seized them again. 
The mirage shall become a pool and through life’s 
discipline and expertence, faith and obedience, we 
shall reach that pool and find it filled to the brim 
with the water of life. 


THE WAY WHICH IS DESERT 


PRINCIPAL R. Bruce Taytor, Kingston, Canaaa 


“The angel of the Lord spake unto Philip saying, Arise 
and go toward the south unto the way that goeth down from 
Jerusalem unto Gaza which is desert.”——Acts viii. 26. 


There were in the days of the Roman rule in 
Palestine several good roads leading from Jeru- 
salem to Gaza. The best and the most frequented 
was the road that led down through the Valley of 
Aijalon, scene of so many encounters between Philis- 
tine and Hebrew in the old heroic days. This road 
struck the seacoast south of Jaffa and then fol- 
lowed the ancient road, trodden since the dawn of 
history by the caravans, between Egypt and the 
Euphrates. The other road held south from Jeru- 
salem along the high land of Judza, passed through 
Bethlehem and Hebron and then struck south-west 
by the foothills to this city by the sea. This was 
“the way which is desert.”” The greater part of its 
length lay along the wilderness of Judzea, parched 
by drought. Along this unfamiliar and unpopu- 
lated way Philip was sent at the bidding of his 
Lord. If he wondered at the choice that had been 
made for him, can we think it strange? The power 
of the spirit was in those days so great that wherever 
the Apostles went the signs of grace were present. 

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74 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


This command seemed to be the shutting up of 
activity. The road was desolate and Gaza itself pre- 
sented no promising field for Christian work. But 
there was no hesitation in the obedience, and may 
we not think that the work of that day may have 
had much to do with the founding of the Church 
in the upper regions of the Nile? They are singu- 
larly attractive characters, these:—Philip with his 
obedience, his zeal, -his openmindedness; and the 
Ethiopian with his search after truth, his feeling 
that in God’s word there was the message for him, 
his ingenuousness, and his willingness to receive the 
stamp of a new life. 

It is, however, with Philip and the desert way 
that we have to-day most specially to do. God’s 
people are so often being asked to take that desert 
way when so many easier ways seem to lead to the 
same destination and result; they so often have the 
pain of seeing, when they are toiling with their dif- 
ficulties, the cavalcade of others moving swiftly and 
easily along some other path, that in their obedience 
there is a certain grudge, a wish that God had chosen 
for them another and a more level track. 

But there is something about the desert road 
that enlarges our sympathy and breaks down those 
barriers that in populous places men build around 
themselves. The solitary people on the desert road 
are more easy to reach than the crowds upon the 
Broadway of the occupied life. When you were 
crossing the Atlantic on a noble liner, you came up 
from breakfast one morning to see a smudge of 
smoke on the horizon ahead of you. By lunch time 
you were level with the cause of it all. A dingy old 


THE WAY WHICH IS DESERT 75 


Glasgow tramp steamer, her sides red with rust, her 
bow plunging deep into the sea, and at each plunge 
lifting her propeller out of the water. If you had 
been standing on Battery Point when she entered 
New York Harbor, you would never have given her 
a second look. But now, on the waste of waters, she 
is the only moving thing besides yourself, and you 
go down to your cabin and get your field-glasses, 
and, perched along the rail with the other passen- 
gers, you scan her carefully in the effort to read her 
name. It is the desert road that makes the kinship, 
and you have time to investigate. For upon that 
road social distinctions count for nothing. A man 
has the opportuntiy to read, and to think, and to 
remember. Events that seem haphazard fall into 
sequence. The very quiet is full of suggestion. 
Questions arise more quickly than answers. The 
mind begins to live its own life and those urgent 
claims of society and the narrow and material stand- 
ards of society have no place in that quiet track and 
clear air. And even though we are hid from one 
another by turns in the road, there are so many of 
us in the desert way that any man who can explain 
to us that which our own souls are seeking will 
draw from us a very avalanche of response. 
Towards the close of his life Stevenson wrote 
from Samoa to George Meredith, “For fourteen 
years I have not had a day’s real health; I have 
wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have 
done my work unflinchingly. I have written in 
bed and written out of it, written in hemorrhages, 
written in sickness ; written torn by coughing, written 
when my head swam for weakness; and, for so long, 


76 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


it seems to me I have won my wager and recov- 
ered my glove. I am better now, have been rightly 
speaking since first I came to the Pacific: and still 
few are the days when I am not in some physical 
distress. And the battle goes on, ill or well is a 
trifle, so as it goes. I was made for a contest and 
the Powers have so willed that my battlefield should 
be this dingy inglorious one of the bed and the 
physic bottle. At least I have not failed, but I 
would have preferred a place of trumpetings and 
the open air over my head.’’? And the hold that 
Stevenson has upon us, the reason why his work, 
so much of which is comparatively slight, is being 
more and more bought, and conned, and treasured, 
is just because we feel that this man, himself upon a 
desert way, had heartening and interpretation to give 
to other wayfarers. He would not have gone that 
way of his own choice. Who would seek to have a 
life so burdened with weakness as his was? But 
being bidden to go that way he tramped it bravely 
without complaining and with a stiff upper lip, and 
he caught up with rich and poor travelling also that 
way, and he left them better and brighter for the 
intercourse, a little ashamed of their depression and 
their querulousness, a little more anxious to look up 
and see the sky. | 

It was this meeting in the desert way that made 
Philip declare to himself just what his faith meant 
and involved. Philip had been brought up in all 
the Jewish strictness. Those who lay beyond the cov- 
enant of circumcision were aliens to the common- 
wealth of Israel. All at once, in the very infancy 

* Letters 4. 243. 


THE WAY WHICH IS DESERT nu 


of the Church, this question was sprung upon a 
simple Apostle in that desert way by a man counted 
by the Jews as altogether unable to belong to their 
religious fellowship. “See here is water: what doth 
hinder me to be baptized?” What indeed? Tradi- 
tion and authority, on the one hand. And sym- 
pathy and faith and the spirit of the Master on the 
other. In a moment Philip accepted the responsi- 
bility and baptized the Ethiopian. 

So the desert way is that in which, all on the in- 
stant, you are brought face to face with the ques- 
tion whether what you think you believe is only a 
pious or conventional opinion, or whether it is 
really the substance of a faith on which you are pre- 
pared to act and to rest. The crowded life and the 
jostling city streets give you no time to detach in 
your mind the things that really matter from the 
things which are the conventional apparatus of 
orthodoxy. But at any moment in the desert way 
you may be brought up against facts that will com- 
pel you to declare yourself, will compel you to state 
to yourself whether your faith is your own or merely 
a pious probability. 

Perhaps you have come in the desert way to face 
disappointment, for this, of all human experiences, 
is the most universal. No one of mature life but 
has known what disappointme nt means, and behind 
our placid faces there is always something that may 
involve, not any bitterness, but certainly a poignant 
regret. There are not many lines in our language 
more sad than this: | 

“The little house we built to be so happy in.” 
It stands for so much, for the love that was going 


78 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


to fill it and for the hundreds of small, personal, 
private, cherished hopes that in this grim life have 
somehow miscarried. We often look at men and 
think that they represent success. Success, after all, 
is a relative term and the amazing thing is that so 
often people, who have in them greatness enough to 
succeed, have likewise in them littleness enough to 
turn a comparative failure into dust and ashes. 
Mark Pattison ended his days as Master of Lin- 
coln College, Oxford. He was the Casaubon of 
George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” and one of the great 
scholars of his day. At this time Oxford was chang- 
ing from the old, easy-going, semi-monastic life, to 
the more intense and scholarly existence that is its 
splendid position now. The Master of the College 
was elected by the Fellows, and, when a vacancy 
took place, Pattison was passed over by a mean 
cabal and another in no way his equal was elected 
to the office. That was an experience surely com- 
mon enough to have in its familiarity its remedy. 
But for Pattison, great scholar as he was, the situa- 
tion had no gleam of light in its darkness. He was 
completely upset by the trouble. The autobiography 
is full of things that no man should let himself 
think, much less write. And when, ten years later, 
the Mastership did come to him on a second vacan- 
cy, it found him a man embittered, to whom the 
desert road had brought nothing but misery and 
pain. Brains and character have, often. enough, 
hardly a bowing acquaintance. 

But the details of that desert journey have to be 
filled in by every man for himself. One of the fre- 
quent sorrows of life is the misunderstanding that 


THE WAY WHICH IS DESERT 79 


separates old friends. Time itself may work the 
trouble; the choosing of a different profession and 
the falling into different ways of thinking; the lin- 
ing up on separate sides in politics; the marrying of 
a woman who separates a man from his old inter- 
ests and friends. All these, or any one of them, 
may mean loneliness and the avoidance of places 
which in the old days were full of laughter and good 
fellowship. Or it may be the pain of having your 
character and veracity questioned. That is the kind 
of attack to which proud men will make no reply. 
They suffer, but they suffer silently. They remem- 
ber that he who excuses himself accuses himself. 
They are afraid that their own exculpation might in- 
volve another in their reproach. And so because of 
the spirit of chivalry, they take the road alone and 
follow it without complaining. 

And then there is the most desert road of all 
where you stand face to face with your Saviour and 
understand without any shrouding of the facts from 
yourself that henceforth you are going to be a very 
lonely man. Nothing can bring back the past, nor 
can it repeat itself. Your body grows older but 
still more does your heart. And there do come upon 
those, who for decades seem to have been shel- 
tered from sorrow, blows that repeat themselves 
as though destiny meant to average its joy and pain. 
In these distresses some people simply lie down. 
They can find nothing of companionship upon that 
desert road, and they fall by the wayside and never 
resume their journey. And there are others who 
follow the path again, but with eyes that have lost 
their light, and tempers that only endure until their 


80 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


day be done. And there are others who cover their 
sorrow with a laugh, whom the world thinks callous 
because they protect themselves and the privacy of 
their souls by this obvious device. Sir William 
Osler, who was surely the beloved physician and 
whose life we all have been reading, had one son, 
born to him when he was in middle life, and upon 
this lad all of a strong man’s love was poured. 
When war broke out the boy did his duty and volun- 
teered at once. There were the months of training 
with all the variety of interest, and then the ex- 
periences of the Front with its heroism, and its dirt, 
and its pain. And then one day the news that the 
lad had been hit and was dying, and a few hours 
later the story that he was gone. Osler, who had 
done so much for other people’s sorrow, did not let 
this blow, which finally was to kill him, turn him 
aside for a day from his work, but went on. He 
doubtless said that the desert road was not as empty 
as people thought it, but his friends saw him age 
as he tramped it and the distress was in a short time 
to end his own life. But he never faltered. The 
things that he had destined for his boy he turned 
to uses that others might enjoy. His library, so 
carefully read, each book filled with his own anno- 
tations, he gave to his old Alma Mater, McGill Uni- 
versity, and his house in Oxford to those who 
should succeed him in his Chair. And so it is that 
as men read his books or cross the threshold of his 
old home, they think of the way in which one brave 
man trod the desert road and showed that his own 
philosophy of life was not unreal. 

Two men journeying upon a way that was desert, 


THE WAY WHICH IS DESERT 81 


and even to-day for you and me there is sunshine 
in that story of the Ethiopian and Philip. For one 
knew the will of God and sought to do it; the other 
sought the will of God that he might be able to do 
it. They met, the seeker and the finder, and the 
dew of its youth is still upon that story of two 
thousand years ago. Even a trickle of water by 
the wayside became a baptismal font. The inward 
faith saw the outward opportunity. The place where 
the traveller stopped to refresh his thirst was made 
the starting point of a new life. 

The way that is desert—every way is desert for a 
heart that will not look up. Laurence Sterne said, 
“TI pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beer- 
sheba and can say, ‘’Tis all barren!’ and so it is, and 
so is all the world beside to him who will not use 
the fruits it offers.” And where faith is, there the 
road, taken with all human disinclination, becomes a 
way on which you find your strength. Thirty years 
ago I began my ministry in a little village in the up- 
lands of Ayrshire in Scotland. It was a place most 
isolated, shut off by the moorland from much hu- 
man companionship. The people had been hand- 
loom weavers, and as the hand-loom disappeared be- 
fore the power-loom, they had fallen into great 
distress. Underfeeding, intermarrying and lack of 
knowledge had contributed to the spread of tubercu- 
losis, and the young people died like flies. One old 
widow, who had had seven in her family, had, when 
I knew the neighborhood first, but one child left, a 
daughter of twenty-three. She, too, sickened, and 
struggled, and died. The morning after her death 
I went down early before breakfast to ask for my 


82 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


old friend, fearful as to whether she could have 
borne up against her distress. The house was the 
usual “but and ben,” and at a rapping at the door 
the cheeriest of voices invited me within. “Come 
awa’ in,’ she said, “I ken your foot.” I entered 
and explained that I had lain awake thinking of 
her, wondering how she had carried her sorrow. 
She was busy at the moment, blackening her fire- 
side with a brush, and she turned around and said, 
“My laddie, dinna you fash” (Don’t you trouble 
yourself), “I’m abune masel,” (I’m above myself). 
It was the finest thing I ever heard and it came 
from an old woman, almost illiterate, upon whom 
there had come sorrow after sorrow. A desert road 
indeed, but a Comforter there! There is a great 
phrase in the Book of Daniel with which those who 
sorrow might very well comfort themselves. “Did 
not we cast three men bound into the midst of the 
fire... Lo, I see four men walking in the midst 
of the fire and they have no hurt, and the form. of 
the fourth is like the Son of God.” 


THE ATTAINMENT OF FREEDOM 


Dr. PETER AINSLIE, Baltimore, Maryland 


“Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you 
free.’——John viii. 32. 


In this text there is a vision, a search and an at- 
tainment. I say a vision because it is in the future 
tense; I say a search because no one finds the truth 
without searching for it; I say an attainment be- 
cause freedom is not something that can be thrust 
upon you like a cloak, but must be attained. This at- 
tainment sometimes comes at great cost; it can never 
be without some cost. 

The vision is glorious because it is the vision of 
Jesus and a radiance from Him gives illumination 
to the path that we must tread. “Shall” is an auxil- 
iary to the future tense as expressing a determina- 
tion, a command. It is not only something that 
must be done, but something that I must do. It is 
a word of authority. “Thou shalt” or “thou shalt 
not” is the language of law-givers and commanders. 
The worth of the human soul is observed in the 
majesty of decision when it says, with an echo to 
the last domain of conscience, “I will.” It is then 
that obstacles fall down as though they are pressed 
by the feet of a tornado. 

The bad habit of a vacillating will is among the 

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84 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


most discouraging conditions in the way of human 
progress. The world’s wickedness and helplessness 
must be met by a decision that includes and expresses 
itself in self-giving, checking wickedness on one 
hand and upholding helplessness on the other, while 
its vision sweeps down the path made radiant by 
Jesus. 

He lives best who lives in the future. While the 
farmer is plowing his land he is living in the months 
when the harvest will be gathered. He plants his 
orchard and, at once, there is before him in the com- 
ing years trees laden with fruit. It is so with those 
engaged in merchandising, commerce, manufactures, 
trades, professions, art, inventions and discoveries. 
They all look to the attainment of things and their 
attainments are the prophecies of spiritual attitudes. 
“Now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet 
appear what we shall be; but we know that, when 
He shall appear, we shall be like Him, for we shall 
see Him as He is.” No one can get rid of this 
vision in himself. The divine in us lies hid inerad- 
icably beneath the debris of our thoughts and pur- 
poses and dreams. Our best is for ever standing in 
abeyance. A thousand things may blur our vision, 
but some day a great experience comes. The long- 
obscured vision is cleared as one wipes clean with 
towel and water the dusty window-pane and abeyance 
gives place to action. 

We work with individuals, and the work is cheered 
not so much by what they are as by what they 
promise to be. Every spiritual worker carries his 
spy-glass with which he is constantly looking into 
tomorrow. We preachers in preparing our sermons 


THE ATTAINMENT OF FREEDOM 85 


could never make appeals for decisions for Christ or 
give exhortation for growth in Him if we did not 
see, in the midst of our preparations, people making 
decisions for Christ and others showing forth the 
fruit of righteousness. Destroy this vision in the 
preacher, and you kill in him the spirit of evangel- 
ism; destroy in the individual the vision of his 
growth toward God and you deaden his soul. The 
“shall” of my text foretells the possibility of all. 
It is the door set ajar. It is a ray of light falling 
across a world of darkness. It is the approach to 
the miracle of looking through the eyes of Jesus. 
The assurance comes as a summons with compelling 
force. “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall 
make you free.”’ 

To search and to find out is one of the controlling 
factors of the soul. Thinking implies adventure into 
the unknown... A Persian lad asked: “Does God 
think?” And the answer was: “Man thinks be- 
cause he does not know. God knows and so He 
does not think.” Thinking enlists man in the cam- 
paign for truth. He may traverse the fields of the 
universe. With telescope and microscope he has gone 
far and wide, and has brought back astonishing 
results. He has commanded electricity and found 
road-beds on the currents of the air. In his indomi- 
table search the physical world has given up its 
secrets as a pledge that the spiritual world will like- 
wise yield its secrets when the same degree of the 
indomitable search possesses the soul. Voices come 
from the lowest strata of the rock as from the far- 
thest stars calling to the soul to make adventures 
toward God. An indescribable urge.is within us, 


86 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


and I would pray with Fénelon: “O God, I would 
have no other desire than to accomplish Thy will. 
Teach me to pray. Pray Thyself in me.” God is 
here. Only the soul’s unfaith and timidity make 
uncertain our approach; but, in spite of all hesi- 
tancy, the desire to know gives color to our thought 
and expectation. | 

Preceding the words of my text are these words: 
“Tf ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples 
indeed.” Christ cannot be found by geographical 
calculations nor by scientific dimensions. Creeds 
are too narrow boundaries for approaches to Him. 
I do not disparage scientific findings nor creedal 
declarations, but they are merely incidental to the 
fact of Christ. Discipleship is satisfied only with 
Him. To Pilate’s question—“What is truth?” mul- 
titudes have sought to formulate answers. Pens of 
the nations have been scribbling out definitions. 
What one group labels “orthodox,” another labels 
“heterodox.” The calendar moves up a little. The 
descendants of the accused and the accusers some- 
what shift in their adjustments to a new calendar, 
so that what one age affirms, a later age modifies or 
denies. 

We linger too long in the field of the less diffi- 
cult. Making physical adventures and writing creeds 
are easy tasks by the side of adventures toward 
God. To walk the way, to find the truth, and to 
hold the life—these are the challenges thrown down 
by Jesus Christ, when He affirmed: “I am the way, 
the truth, and the life.’ You cannot put Christ in 
a book any more than you can put Him in marble 
statues or on richly colored paintings. ‘Truth is in 


THE ATTAINMENT OF FREEDOM 87 


personality—in Him, in you, in me, in all whose 
discipleship has started them on the way. It comes 
into us like the tides—slowly, but surely. We are 
made for the possession of truth. “We are His 
people, and the sheep of His pasture.’’ To deny us 
truth is worse than denying bread to the hungry or 
water to the thirsty. “Did I not tell you there ought 
to be a God like that ?”’ said an old woman in Africa, 
when she first heard the Gospel. In the experience 
of mankind must come the reality of God as revealed 
in Jesus Christ our Lord. It is the most beneficent 
dream in human possibilities, and alone satisfies the 
reality of religious experience. 

[ am not disturbed about the logic of religion. 
Indeed, religion is not logical. It is rather alogical 
and is as little rational as the passion of love and 
hate, which to gain its object may fling prudence, 
calculation and reason all to the winds. It was this 
understanding of religion that moved the Apostle 
Paul to say: “I count not my life dear unto me,” 
and “I can do all things through Christ.” Such 
was the declaration of passionate love. This is the 
path by which we come to know the fullness of 
truth—the costliest path that man ever walked. “Ye 
shall know the truth and the truth shall make you 
free.” 

There must be freedom if there would be growth. 
The consciousness of God is essential to both growth 
and freedom. That He is here is the greatest fact of 
time. Before the days of Christianity a Grecian 
poet had said: “We are His offspring,” upon which 
the Apostle Paul elaborated, saying: ‘In Him we 
live, and move, and have our being.” God is free 


88 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


and He is striving to bring the unfree into freedom. 
The way of Jesus is the path to that freedom. 

Failure to grow and to attain freedom is due to 
stupidity of mind and callousness of heart. Long 
before the days of Jesus, Heraclitus said: “To those 
who are awake there is but one world, but sleepers 
have each a little world of their own.” To walk 
the way of Jesus one must abandon his little world 
of individual provincialism and find the paths of 
universal fellowship. God is in mankind. In look- 
ing upon men and women we see Him, sometimes 
wretchedly obscured, sometimes amazingly complex, 
and sometimes radiant as if with the glow of heaven, 
but nevertheless God. Jesus hallowed God’s char- 
acter in the poverty-stricken, the sick, the criminal 
and the outcast. Above all their evil and wretched- 
ness, He saw God. It seemed, as He looked into 
faces of the ignorant, the discouraged, and the 
wrong-doer, He was for ever saying: “Father hal- 
lowed be Thy character.” In this belief war could 
not continue, the poor could not be oppressed, racial 
strife would diminish, the multitude of wrongs that 
crowd the day’s transactions would be halted and 
the standard of brotherhood would be the evidence 
that freedom had been attained. 

Each of us has his problem to solve. We can 
only solve it fairly when we do it in the conscious- 
ness that God is here, urging us onward, lifting us 
over all barriers—denominational, racial, national 
and social—guiding us on the way of Jesus with all 
the cost that it entails, and laying upon us the as- 
surance that our minor experiences with God are the 
undisputed evidences that the reality of the life that 


THE ATTAINMENT OF FREEDOM 89 


we now possess is but the beginning of the life 
whose range of vision and fellowship of souls are 
as wide as the universe. It is the most difficult task 
in human experience to bring the soul to the realiza- 
tion that God is here. It is the divide between faith 
and unfaith, between love and wunlove, between 
timidity and adventure, between indolence and ac- 
tion. Character cannot be formed without action. 
We must study our obligations to God and mankind 
if our actions are to conform in the slightest degree 
to the acts of Him who sought to show men how to 
live. Because He is the life-giver, the growth of 
all divine life is for ever toward freedom. It can- 
not be harnessed by creeds nor theological systems ; 
it cannot be imprisoned by anathemas; it finds its 
way to the larger life as seeds planted in a cellar 
in the dark grow by sickly stalks to the crevice 
where they may find the sunlight and unimprisoned 
air. It is only in the realization of divine life in 
us that the attainment of freedom is possible. 

To every individual belongs the “shall” of my 
text. I cannot suggest a method by which any can 
find a moral right for declining it. To every one 
belongs the privilege of searching, attended with all 
the romance of adventure. The attainment of free- 
dom is the inherent right of the human soul. The 
pathway to this attainment requires laying aside the 
world’s standards in the gentleness and humility 
of Jesus. Then “Ye shall know the truth and the 
truth shall make you free.” 


FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT 


Dr. Witiiam L. Suiivan, St. Louis, Missouri 





“Whereas I was blind, now I see.” John ix. 25. 

It would be hard to find a sentence more moving 
than this. It was spoken by a man born blind who 
had been restored to sight. For the first time in all 
his life the fields, the streams, the sky, the stars, 
the faces of his fellow-men were his by clear knowl- 
edge and not by dim report. That long-shut win- 
dow of his mind was opened and the light of day 
poured into the chamber that had never hoped to see 
it. In this enlargement of his life and transforma- 
tion of his spirit, his one answer was to those who 
tried to disparage this tremendous experience of his: 
“T was blind, now I see.’ Before that fact all 
theories fell away. In the presence of that reality 
every subterfuge for evading the significance of it 
was useless and senseless. A new world was his 
and he was a new man that possessed it. Let the 
Pharisees theorize ; their theories could not diminish 
his joy, nor take away his certainty of deliverance 
from bleak imprisonment, nor deny the glory of 
his re-birth from darkness into light. At last he 
saw. 

Whether we take this narrative as fact or parable, 
or symbol, the central substance of it retains its 


go 


FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT 91 


truth. This substance is that by a power which we 
are obliged to call divine, the souls of men blind 
without knowing it, or knowing it, hopeless of re- 
covery, are awakened into vision and changed from 
within—and forever. They that were blind are 
made to see. And they are made to see by a process 
the detailed steps of which, if detailed steps there 
are, they do not clearly understand. It seems to be 
rather a happening than a process; illumination 
rather than logic; wisdom bestowed than learning 
acquired. They can give you an account of their 
former condition and a statement of the change that 
has transformed it, but to the question how the 
transition was made from one to the other, they can 
only answer: ‘““Whereas I was blind, now I see,” and 
bow in thankfulness to the Power from whom they 
know their vision comes. Or if sometimes they go 
beyond this, and try to put their experience into 
intellectual propositions, these propositions will have 
of course to be built up of such ideas as the level 
of their culture supplies. These may be quite wrong 
though the experience is indisputably a fact. When, 
for example, such an experience as we are now deal- 
ing with happened to an ancient Greek, he would 
attribute it to one of his gods, Zeus, let us say, or 
Athene, or Apollo. He would be in error in doing 
so, for there are no such beings; but he would not 
be in error in knowing that the experience had come 
to him, nor, probably, in believing that it had come 
from a divine source. He misconceived the nature 
of the divine, but he could not help this. Such 
names as he had for the eternal Reality, he used; 
but that intellectual shortcoming does not invalidate 


92 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


the spiritual occurrence. We can seek and in our 
measure know God by a pure faith even if we have 
not a correct theology; as on the other hand we may 
have a correct theology and have no faith in its sub- 
lime sense, at all, nor any inner communion with the 
Supreme Spirit. In a word, spiritual experience is 
not dependent upon our rationalized interpretation 
of it. The experience is the prior and fundamental 
thing; the theological terms that we may employ in 
describing it are later and subordinate. We do not 
need to be delivered from the temporal to have 
glimpses of the eternal. 

Treating, then, not of the transient theology but 
of the transforming experience that lies beneath it, 
let us give an illustration or two of how this redemp- 
tive work is done in the history of souls. 

Suppose, first, a man who is an ardent disciple of 
his religious sect. Honestly as well as earnestly he 
believes it to be the highest teacher of the truth. In 
his devotion to it he acquires, let us say, the habit 
of diplomatic reticence concerning its deficiencies 
and of exaggerated emphasis upon its virtues. He 
falls next into the custom of greedily believing evil 
reports of other churches on the principle of per- 
verse attachment, that the blacker everybody else is 
the whiter we are. He reads history with eyes thus 
distorted whenever history touches upon his sect. 
Tie may even write history someday. If he does, 
he presents it, as far as he dares, with clever sup- 
pressions and in the color of his prejudice. So one 
step follows another in the disintegration of ve- 
racity. Yet he would resent being called a falsifier. 
He has not all along been aware of his descent 


FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT 93 


toward the pit which is falsehood. The great word 
loyalty has misled him because he has mistaken the 
order and rank of loyalties and has put first what 
should never be first. He deserves the reproach 
which in striking and terrible phrase Lord Acton 
once uttered against an eminent churchman of his 
own faith: “He is not the servant, but the manipula- 
tor of Truth.” ; 

Such is his state, and for years he may remain 
in it thinking that he sees, but in reality blind. 
Then one day the word that works wonders speaks 
in his heart. He hears the voice of an authority 
that is not of his choosing, and it commands him 
to follow and to serve the truth. His eyes are 
opened. He sees Truth no longer as an instrument 
for promoting the interests of partisanship, but as 
an august Presence with an inherent right to domin- 
ion over minds. He sees its beauty and perfection. 
He sees its deserted altar, and knows that he has 
been one of those who have deserted it. But wil- 
fully he can never desert it again. Henceforth his 
place is there; and communion with that Presence 
which is the fulfillment of his soul becomes a con- 
stant aspiration of his life. He is reborn and re- 
deemed. In as true a sense as the man born blind 
he comes into the possession of a kingdom; but by 
a greater marvel and mystery he possesses it through 
a vision of its King. 

Let us take one example more. Here is a man 
who contrives for himself what he calls a practical 
philosophy of life, a way of living, he says, that has 
no nonsense in it. The way to get on is to be hard, 
he declares. If people are in your way throw them 


94 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


out of it if you can; overreach and delude them, if 
that seems better; but by any means efficacious for 
the purpose set them aside and forget them when 
they have been put behind you. Then when you 
get success without scruple, enjoy it without re- 
morse. As for any duty speaking from eternity, or 
any destiny that has a sovereign Spirit at the other 
end of it, or any grace and nobleness that enlarge 
the soul with a sense of trust and peace in divine 
fidelity, he will have none of these. He will quote 
for you from learned men who deny the reality of 
such things, as so many do who judge of their souls 
by such outward testimony instead of judging this 
testimony by their silenced souls. Skeptical of spirit 
he is credulous of sense—the most fearful credulity 
there is. Scornful of the Highest, he yet makes 
himself a highest. Having put out his eyes so that 
he cannot see anything that is glorious, he bids you 
to see glory in all that is mean. 

Then comes for him also the appointed hour. 
One day the accustomed clamor dies away. The 
lower excitements are still. The usual voices of low 
seduction fall to silence. He sees his soul. He 
hears the voice of conscience, quiet and calm, as it 
always is, giving utterance to an everlasting law. 
Forgotten forms of beauty move into the field of his 
recovered vision. They are Justice so little heeded, 
Wisdom so long kept out, Fidelity so many times 
profaned, the Peace so completely lost. These make 
up the world that he should have lived in and has 
not. These alone give happiness. These, when all 
things besides crumble and sink to dust, remain as 
the fulfillment of souls. They were his inheritance 


FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT 95 


and he flung them away, though nothing upon the 
whole earth can be desirable without them. 

He sees at last. He sees the folly that is dis- 
guised by passion; the emptiness that is celebrated 
by a certain kind of learning; the ruin that is recom- 
mended by the loud voices of vulgarity. And seeing 
this he can never be the same again. This indeed is 
the peculiar wonder and witness of the soul’s re- 
generation. Once let us look upon the uncreated 
glory, once let us open our eyes upon the Justice 
that rules from everlasting, the Truth that speaks 
from the infinite Source of all, the living Beauty 
and the deathless Love for which our souls are 
made, and we are not the same any more forever. 
Even if after that we sin, we are haunted and pur- 
sued by the transcendent Reality that we have 
known. Changed from within is every soul who 
will allow the Holiest One to enter it and speak 
to it. 

Each of us, dear Friends, conscious of his falling 
short, and remembering his narrowness and selfish- 
ness may say, “I was blind.” Now may we also 
expect the redeeming power, the light that illumi- 
nateth every man; turn to it in trust, receive its 
unfailing grace, and be able to say: “I see. I see 
the solid meaning and divine purpose of life. I see 
the way of my high vocation. I see restoration 
beyond failure, the stars beyond the darkness, the 
healing appointed for the hurt, the peace that 
assuages our warfare, the truth that dispels our 
ignorance, the Lord God in the highest Who leads 
us according to His love.” 


LIVING WITH OTHER PEOPLE 


Dr. ALEXANDER Mac COLt, 
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 


Part of the difficulty in living with other people 
comes from the fact that we are so much alike. We 
are alike in this; that many of us who are trying 
every day to live with other people have not learned 
to live happily with ourselves. We are so constantly 
in our own company that we are “fed up” with our- 
selves, or we are disappointed with ourselves, or not 
altogether honest with ourselves; especially we are 
forgetful that there is One who knows all about us, 
from Whom there can be no secrets. We live con- 
stantly with our regrets, our grievances and our 
fears, and then to use the popular phrase, we “take 
it out on other people’ who are so unfortunate as to 
live with us, and who frequently are in just the same 
plight. Much of the friction of the world without 
is simply the surface symptom of daily irritation 
within. When two people who try to live together 
are both of them unhappy, or introspective, or 
resentful, or moody, or mean, or pessimistic, the 
combination is not likely to be successful. 

But no less the difficulty of living with other 
people is traceable to the fact that we are so unlike. 
For in the marvel of the Creator’s work, no two 

96 


‘ 


LIVING WITH OTHER PEOPLE 97 


human beings are just alike, even in appearance, 
close as resemblance may be; still less in disposi- 
tion, in temperament and in taste. Many of the 
difficulties of living together which are brought to 
our notice in Scripture arose from such differences. 
Sometimes the people concerned were children of 
one family. To Cain and Abel there was given the 
difficult job of living together as brothers, but they 
were so different that it proved impossible. Their 
occupations were different; Abel was a keeper of 
sheep, Cain was a tiller of the ground. And their 
dispositions were different; Abel apparently was 
kindly, openhearted, patient and reverent; Cain was 
selfish, envious, secretive and hot tempered. Their 
tragedy was the first vain effort to live together 
which issued in murder. Jacob and Esau were an- 
other pair who had similar difficulty. They were 
different in appearance. Esau, we are told, was a 
hairy man, and Jacob is rightly called a smooth man 
—for a smooth article he was. Esau was a rough 
diamond, a man of the open air, a hunter with a big 
appetite; to him nothing seemed so immediately im- 
portant as the satisfaction of his appetites. Jacob 
was his mother’s boy, rather too good to be genuine, 
a man with a keen eye to the ultimate interests of 
Jacob, the first to have that strange combination of 
piety and trickery which has worked such dreadful 
havoc in the world. Between two such boys diffi- 
culties were inevitable and they came. Before we 
leave Esau, here is another glimpse of the sources of 
trouble in living together. Esau, we are told, was 
forty years old when he took to wife Judith, the 
daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Bashemath, the 


98 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


daughter of Elon the Hittite. Esau was captured 
by a pretty face or a comely figure—no real com- 
munity of interest, no kinship in the same sacred 
heritage, no common worship of God, no common 
aspiration after better things. No wonder we read 
this pathetic result, “which were a grief of mind to 
Isaac and to Rebekah.” If a boy and girl today 
who have hardly known one another—in love, not 
with each other, but with being in love, with ro- 
mance, adventure and a good time—try out of their 
varied heritage, and habits, and likes and dislikes, to 
construct a happy home, is it any wonder that dis- 
aster so often comes, and the issue is the divorce 
court? Abraham and Lot were kinsmen who tried 
to live together and work together. Here it is 
noticeable that the trouble which made it difficult 
for them to live together was made largely by other 
people. How many cases there are of this; what 
tragedies of division and of bitterness, the tale 
bearer, the indiscreet friend, the unwise parent have 
brought into being! 

In the New Testament we have a glimpse of Mary 
and Martha and Lazarus engaged in the fascinating 
business of living together—all of them very dif- 
ferent. Martha was a woman of character and 
decision, always active, always busy about the house, 
keeping everything in the finest order, a model 
housekeeper: Mary, rather dreamy, meditative, in- 
trospective, disposed—had she lived in our time— 
to sit down in a corner with a book, ready to post- 
pone the more active things that can be done at 
some other time. How many an appeal like that of 
Martha to our Lord—“speak to my sister”! lLaz- 


LIVING WITH OTHER PEOPLE 99 


arus apparently was largely a negative character, 
noted not so much for the things he did as for the 
things he did not do, a useful brother who plays a 
minor part in the story until his day of sickness and 
death came. When such contrasts of interest and 
temperament exist, usually there are faults on all 
sides when it proves impossible to live togther hap- 
pily, but not always. For among the sorrows of our 
Lord was that His home life was not always happy, 
and one cannot believe that He was at fault. His 
brothers did not believe in Him, tried to depreciate 
Him, said He was mad, sought to have Him con- 
fined. And even His mother sorely tried Him 
because she could not see what He saw, or know 
what He knew. 

Now the secret of living together happily in the 
home, in business and in the community is to be 
found, I believe, in recognizing frankly and thought- 
fully the two facts of which I have spoken—that we 
are so much alike, and that we are so much unlike. 

1. The fact that we are so much alike ought to 
make us very patient with one another. Have you 
ever, for instance, had a day when you did not feel 
very well? It was something you ate, or the weather 
was atrocious, or the noises of the city had jarred 
on sensitive nerves, or you were suffering from a 
bit of overwork or overworry. You were not at 
your best that day, were you? Then do not expect 
other people to be always on the crest of the wave. 
(Yet here is a definition of friendship which some 
one gave me the other day: Friendship is always 
coming to people at your best). Many queernesses 
in other people, as well as in us, are due to physical 


100 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


conditions, sometimes conditions of which the victim 
is conscious, sometimes hidden and obscure. Let us 
then, who are, most of us, a bit queer, be patient 
with others in their queernesses. 

And then this recognition that we are so much 
alike should make us very forgiving. It was a 
master stroke of Jesus that when men came to Him 
pouring out the wrongs of life, He always turned 
the searchlight right into their own hearts and 
seemed to ask, ‘Don’t you need to be forgiven?” 
Remember that, and find the secret of the treatment 
of others there—‘‘forgive us as we forgive others.”’ 

And finally the recognition that we are so much 
alike ought to make us speak of the best in others 
and expect the best in others. We are, most of us, 
very sensitive to atmosphere. If people are critical 
and antagonistic, we show at our worst. “He could 
do no mighty work there” —it is written of Jesus in 
a place where people depreciated Him. In an atmos- 
phere of sympathy and confidence when others seem 
to believe better things of us than we know we are 
worthy of, the impulse is to try to be worthy of 
them. And this of course is true of other people. 
And so one secret of living with them in any rela- 
tion of life is to overlook a good many faults, and 
expect and speak about the best in them. ‘“Some- 
how you all just bluffed me into being better. I 
wasn't used to being bragged on, and it made me 
want to be good more than anything in the world” 
—so said “Lovey Mary” to “Mrs. Wiggs.” 

2. But the secret of living happily with people 
in any relation of life is to be found in frank recog- 
nition, not only that we are like them, but that we 


LIVING WITH OTHER PEOPLE 101 


are so unlike them; in frank recognition that they 
are different, and have a right to be different. Most 
of the troubles of the world come from a lack of 
respect for personality. The man who attempts to 
use his home simply as a sphere for the indulgence 
of his own self-interest, and who would make wife 
or children his slaves, has at the heart of his offense 
a lack of respect for them as personalities endowed 
of God with the same rich trust given to every man 
and woman who walks this earth, The man who 
uses his employees simply as hands or tools for the 
working of his ends has at the root of his sin a lack 
of respect for the personality of his brother men, 
who are entitled to the same fine consideration as 
human beings, the same right to prosper and enjoy 
which he claims for himself. The things that divide 
us one from another as citizens of a common state, 
the things that divide nations in hatred and bitter- 
ness have at their heart, as a rule, more than any- 
thing else, a lack of respect for the greatness and 
sacredness of human personality. 

And then we ought to recognize gratefully that 
we are unlike, because only when we are unlike is a 
happy home or a successful business or a prosperous 
community likely to result. We are not meant to 
be duplicates or triplicates, each simply a copy of 
the other; rather our gifts and talents and tastes are 
to be complementary, each of us supplying some- 
thing that is lacking in the other, each of us making 
his contribution which no other perhaps so well can 
make to the common good of the home or business 
or the state. When you find a happy home, it is 
usually because one of the family supplements the 


102 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


other; the adaptations of conflicting taste and tem- 
perament have been happily made, each considers the 
other or finds joy in helping the other to be useful 
or to be happy. When you find a successful busi- 
ness, it is usually because the partners are not alike, 
but because they are different, each supplying hap- 
pily something which the other lacks; each happy in 
one bit of the work which he can do better than 
the other, leaving the other to do his part with his 
peculiar skill. So in the whole broad sweep of life 
in the city, in the state, among the nations, it is 
when we learn Paul’s great lesson that we are “mem- 
bers one of another,” that we are necessary each to 
the other’s good—each contributing something for 
the enrichment and enjoyment of the other’s life— 
it is then that the great program of living together 
is on the way to be realized. One of the amazing 
things about this great country of ours—perhaps the 
last effort of Almighty God on behalf of mankind, 
as Emerson suggested—is that here men and women 
of all races and kindred and tongues are merging 
their infinitely varied heritage in the wonderful 
fabric of our citizenship. 

No small part of the business of religion is to 
help men and women to live happily with themselves 
and with other people. And the way to live with 
other people which I have attempted to describe in 
this sermon is all summed up with the marvelous 
terseness of this sacred Book in these great words: 
“Look not every man on his own things, but every 
man also on the things of others. Let this mind be 
in you which was also in Christ Jesus.” 


WORSHIP AS INSIGHT 


PROFESSOR THEODORE GERALD SOARES, 


University of Chicago 


“When the centurion saw what was done, he glorified God, 
saying, Certainly this was a righteous man.’——Luke xxili. 47. 


That was a great moment in the life of the cen- 
turion. He was a rough Roman soldier to whom 
the torture of crucifixion was part of the day’s 
work. He was accustomed to human agony and 
perhaps, as often happens to those familiar with 
cruelty, he had even come to enjoy it. But here 
was a different victim. The soldier was startled 
into a recognition of the unusual character of the 
man who had just yielded up his spirit to the 
Father. It was for him a moment of insight. 
What came of it we do not know, but at that moment 
the soldier saw a great meaning. 

To all men at some time come such revealing ex- 
periences. Life is suddenly illuminated; they see 
truth, value, duty, with a wholly new glory and 
appeal. I remember a young man at the birth of 
his first baby. He had always seemed commonplace 
and careless. But now he held in his arms a son. 
The wonder of fatherhood was in his face. It was 
a great moment; and I think he was making some 
high resolves. 

103 


104 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


Men become heroes in their great moments. The 
young millionaire stood on the deck of the sinking 
vessel. The life-belt that was the one slim hope 
of safety was fastened about him. But he saw a 
poor woman from the steerage without one. Quietly 
he took his off and helped her to adjust it on herself. 
What would it profit him to save his life and lose his 
manly courage and self respect? It was a great 
moment and he saw things as they are. 

A man who was described as utterly irreligious— 
though perhaps we do not know enough to speak so 
of anyone; at all events, he was a man of evil speech 
—had occasion to visit a hospital on business. He 
was obliged to go into the children’s ward. He had 
never been concerned about the suffering of children. 
But face to face with these little creatures lying on 
their white cots in helplessness and pain, his heart 
was touched. It was a great moment for him. He 
gained insight into the meaning of institutions for 
the alleviation of suffering. Before he left the build- 
ing he had written a large check for the children’s 
ward. 

In many ways come these unusual experiences. It 
may be in some inner crisis of one’s career. Called 
to make a great decision, to meet severe disappoint- 
ment, to assume high responsibility, one may be 
lifted out of his common self so that he scarce under- 
stands his own feelings. He finds himself capable 
of a detachment, of a measurement of values, that 
would have seemed beyond his power. 

The high moment may come in the presence of 
great beauty. In the majesty of the sea, in the 
wonder of the mountains, before some masterpiece 


WORSHIP AS INSIGHT 105 


of human skill, one may attain suddenly that exalta- 
tion of spirit that leads to insight. 

It is doubtful if any life is altogether without 
some unusual outlooks; and when they come they are 
very significant. But they may not come very often. 
To some they come only a few times in a whole life. 
It is rather pathetic when people remember two or 
three notable occasions when they were lifted out 
of themselves into momentary greatness. Wistfully 
they look back to them and treasure the memory as 
of something never to be known again. 

It would be very wonderful if there were some 
way to get these high moments more often, even 
regularly, and perhaps with less of the violence that 
often robs them of their value. If we could havea 
great view of life every day, putting things in their 
proportion, the things that are seen as temporal, the 
things that are not seen as eternal, the abidingness 
of faith, hope, and love, with love supreme; if we 
could somehow feel not only at death but in life that 
man is a son of God; if every morning the high call 
could come to us as it came to Isaiah in the temple- 
vision—then might we live great lives. But it would 
seem that any such regular exaltation would be 
impossible. The most that seems attainable is that 
the resolves of the great occasions may carry over 
into the duller hours and keep us faithful. So 
Matthew Arnold has admonished us: 

We cannot kindle when we will 
The fire that in the heart resides, 
The spirit bloweth and is still, 
In mystery the soul abides. 


But tasks in hours of insight willed 
May be through hours of gloom fulfilled. 


106 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


Yet perhaps we are not so limited. There isa real 
sense in which we may kindle those spiritual fires 
when we will. There is such a thing as deliberately 
putting ourselves in the way of inspiration. For 
nothing less than that is the meaning of worship. 
Men have worshiped for many ends, little and great. 
But at its best, the meaning of true worship is to 
secure regularly and often those opportunities of 
insight, which otherwise would come only in excep- 
tional moments and perhaps very infrequently. 

All men will sometimes have flashes of meaning 
that reveal life as the lightning may show the way 
to the bewildered traveler. The worshiper may have 
steadily a lamp for his feet and a light for his path. 
Every day and every week, in private devotion and 
in the common religious assembly, we may put our- 
selves deliberately into the attitude for receiving the 
higher meanings of life. It has been well said that 
a few moments face to face with God in the morning 
may change the tone of the whole day. It is a 
common and blessed experience that the hour of 
worship on Sunday may give the sacred quality to 
all the duties of the week. If worship fulfilled itself 
it would be the means of bringing us with continual 
refreshing to a sense of the greatness of duty, the 
glory of justice, the blessedness of brotherhood, the 
wonder of the experience of fellowship with God. 

But so often worship falls far short of any such 
result. If the purpose of worship is to secure regu- 
larly and often those opportunities of spiritual in- 
sight which otherwise would come only in excep- 
tional moments and very occasionally, why is that 
purpose so little accomplished? Worship certainly 


WORSHIP AS INSIGHT 107 


does not have for most of us the great place thus 
assigned to it. I think there are two reasons for 
the failure. 

The first is that we do not really worship. We 
come to church and we have what we call a “‘serv- 
ice.’ It is a duty, a ceremonial, even a convention- 
ality. It is something to be done as we wind the 
eight-day clock. I will not deny that the habit of 
church attendance has some value, but there comes 
no insight in that fashion. 

What have we really done today in worship? We 
have gathered in the consecrated place which the 
community has set apart for this highest act of life. 
We have heard as we entered the solemn notes of 
the organ bidding us be quiet and listen. We have 
undertaken to speak to Almighty God, believing that 
the Eternal Reality of the universe is kin to our 
spirits and that we may utter our human longings, 
confident of response. We have spoken words that 
Jesus used, and that his disciples have repeated 
through the centuries, words that utter the wish that 
reverence may humble our hearts, that the great 
Good-Will may prevail, that our daily needs may be 
met, that we erring folk may forgive and be for- 
given, and that in the moral conflict that is ever upon 
us we may be victorious through the Everlasting 
Righteousness. No one can pray that prayer in 
earnest and fail of insight. 

If the Christian men and women and youth should 
ever pray the Lord’s Prayer one Sunday morning, 
and mean it, there would come insight into our social 
problems that would carry us into blessed endeavors 
of friendship, justice, and peace. 


108 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


Did anyone take the hymn lightly on his lips? 
That hymn came out of the experience of a great 
soul. Here was a man who loved his fellows, saw 
their troubles and their pain, grappled with the diffi- 
culties that make men afraid, and in it all found 
help in the companionship of Jesus. To Washington 
Gladden there was only one way to go. It was 
Jesus’ way; and he sang his aspiration, “Oh, Master, 
let me walk with thee.” He would walk in the way 
of human service, courage, patience, good work, 
happy confidence, gleaming hope and the peace that 
passeth understanding. Could one sing such longing 
of the heart and fail of insight? 

But worship does fail because we do not mean it. 
We let these glorious expressions, hallowed by the 
faith of the saints, fall from our lips as if they were 
idle songs; or listlessly we do not even sing them, 
our thoughts wandering the while to business or 
pleasure or some fretting care. The Father seeketh 
such to worship him as worship in spirit and in 
truth. 

But there is another reason why worship often 
fails to become insight. Though we pray with a deep 
sense of the value of prayer and sing with a true 
longing to enter into the experience of the divine 
fellowship, we may yet fail to carry over our wor- 
ship into the ways of daily life. 

Preaching recently at Harvard I quoted the hymn, 
“God is wisdom, God is love,” an expression of joy- 
ous, triumphant faith; and at the end of the sermon 
we sang it. After the service President Lowell 
called my attention to the fact that it was written 
by Sir John Bowring, Governor of Hongkong, the 


WORSHIP AS INSIGHT 109 


man who was responsible for the opium war, cer- 
tainly one of the wickedest acts in history. I sug- 
gested that the hymn might have been written after 
he repented of his political sins, but we looked up 
the dates and found that he had always been the 
Christian governor. 

Of course the easy conclusion would be that this 
hymn-writer was a hypocrite. He was pretending to 
be religious, while making political capital out of one 
of the most frightful curses that afflict mankind. 
But that explanation is too easy. There are prob- 
ably not many hypocrites. The hypocrite is one who 
consciously uses his religious profession as a cloak 
for his evil doings. He would have men believe 
him righteous in order that he may impose on their 
credulity. Bowring was not doing that. If he had 
explained his conduct he would have said that he 
ardently desired to do the will of God but that a 
man in a responsible position must meet the exigen- 
cies of his situation. In his public capacity he must 
further the interests of the British Government; in 
his private capacity he could be a humble and happy 
follower of Jesus Christ. 

Macaulay has an interesting description of a like 
episode in the life of the Earl of Rochester. In 
order to influence James II for political purposes the 
Earl employed the offices of a dissolute woman, to 
whose seductions the king was amenable. At the 
very time of this disgraceful intrigue, Rochester was 
writing in his diary expressions of his devout faith 
in God and of his blessed experience of the mercy 
of our Savior. There could have been no thought 
of anybody’s reading the words; indeed, the diary 


110 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


was long unknown in the private papers of the 
Karl. 

How would Rochester have explained his double 
life? Doubtless he would have said that politics 
must be pursued by the best means available. How 
could a stateman deal with a stupid king bent on 
conduct that could only lead to ruin? If the wiles 
of a mistress could do what the arguments of the 
statesman could not effect, then one must use the 
means that were available. But when the quiet hour 
of devotion came, the man of God could forget the 
wretched policies of his office and give himself to 
the sweet communion that is possible in the blessed 
presence of God. 

These men are not hypocrites. Their conduct is 
more subtle than that. They are finding in religion 
an escape from the harshness and the wickedness of 
the world. They would like to do God’s will in 
every act of life, but in some spheres it is too diffi- 
cult. Business and politics have their own standards 
and make their own stern requirements. As a vig- 
orous admiral, with no very keen sense of humor, 
said in the Singapore debate in the House of Com- 
mons, “If the defense of the British Empire is to be 
trusted to the Sermon on the Mount then all I have 
to say is ‘God help us.’’”? We were once told that 
the twelve-hour day was socially and morally wrong 
but industrially inevitable. Evidently it is very diffi- 
cult to be an idealist in those hard spheres of life. 
So men worship God in church on Sunday as an 
idealistic escape from the harsh realities. They are 
not hypocrites. They would be glad if all that is 
good and true and beautiful could be universal. But 


WORSHIP AS INSIGHT 111 


they feel that human society is backward and that 
its affairs call for rough methods. They thank God, 
however, that in worship they can forget the sordid- 
ness of life. They can think of better things, believe 
in a happier future, and pray for the “far-off divine 
event.” They can give their money for all good 
causes, for they do love God and they do love men. 
They cannot let religion interfere with practical life 
for the two interests are different. So they worship 
in order to escape from the world. In such worship 
men may enjoy spiritual luxury but they will never 
attain spiritual insight. 

Much of what has been called “other worldliness” 
has its ground in this desire to escape from the 
harshness of earth into the happiness of heaven. 
Instead of a brave endeavor to change this world, 
men give it up and look for a better. The whole 
problem of poverty is solved if you sing, “I’m the 
child of a king.”’ What do the inequalities of earth 
matter when we are heirs of such riches? But there 
is no insight in such worship. It is simply running 
away from our troubles in order to enjoy our 
dreams. 

The religion of the negro has often been con- 
demned as divorced from morality. But he was 
only doing more thoroughly what the Christians 
have always done when they have made religion an 
escape. It has nothing to do with morality because 
it has nothing to do with this world at all. The 
negro is “walkin’ ’round in God’s heben,” forgetting 
the earth with its harshness, its injustice and its 
moral demands. 

The moral danger of enjoying worship because 


112 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


of its contrast with common life is the same that 
occurs wherever we make cowardly escapes from 
reality. That glorious word “recreation” suggests 
that play is the means of making ourselves more 
truly partakers of life with its work and its serious- 
ness. When we run away from work in order to 
play, when we enjoy play for ourselves and care 
nothing about its cost to another, when we have no 
interest that play may be for all men, and when we 
make play an end in itself, we have made of this 
glorious activity an escape from life instead of the 
recreation of personality for fuller life. 

It is the same with beauty. Ruskin has taught us 
to see in beauty the reproach of ugliness. The 
enjoyment of beauty must not be an escape from the 
ugliness in which other men must live, it must be 
insight into the very meaning of God, bidding us 
make all things beautiful. 

Very serious responsibility is then upon the wor- 
shiper. We are deliberately seeking insight into the 
greater meanings of life. We have come to a house 
dedicated to God. Here are the symbols of his 
presence; here are the memorials of those who lived 
and died in faith; and here occur the sacred acts that 
inspire us with religious feeling. If we have wor- 
shiped in spirit and in truth, we have felt that this 
is the house of God, and we have met God here. 
Now the worship is nearly ended. Soon the last 
tones of the organ will be silent, the pews will be 
empty, the doors will close behind us, we shall be 
out in the busy streets. Where will God be then? 
Will he remain in the quiet sanctuary till we come 
back again? No, God will be gone when the folk 


WORSHIP AS INSIGHT 113 


are gone. He goes out with us into that life of 
social relations, into the tasks, the difficulties, all the 
hurrying crowding obligations. He goes with us to 
be insight into all the baffling meanings of life, that 
we may still believe out there in the busy world what 
we have here expressed in prayers, in songs, in 
hopes, and that we may be workers with him to 
make it true. 


MORAL PREPAREDNESS 


Dr. Minor Srmons, New York City 


“Create in me a clean heart, O God; 
and renew a right spirit within me.” 





Psalm li. 10. 


We live in a world of forces. In nature there are 
mechanical forces; in human nature there are spir- 
itual forces. Both are necessary to us. We live in 
both. We have a certain measure of control over 
both. The mechanical forces are unmoral, the 
human forces are either moral or immoral. When 
moral, the soul uses both mechanical and moral 
forces for righteousness and peace. When immoral, 
the soul uses both for unrighteousness and war, 
individual or collective war. 

Life is an issue between forces; some push up- 
ward, others pull downward. To the extent that 
the upward pushing forces prevail, we have life; if 
the downward pulling forces prevail, we decline and 
perhaps perish. Civilization is a triumph of the 
moral forces. In so far as we are civilized we can 
give right might. Might directed by right builds; 
might directed by wrong destroys. 

Preparedness is not only in might and right but 
in the union of the two. There is no complete pre- 
paredness except in such union, but today my em- 
phasis will be indicated by my text, to which I shall 

114 


MORAL PREPAREDNESS 115 


continually return: “Create in me a clean heart, O 
God; and renew a right spirit within me.” 

Preparedness was yesterday, is today, and will be 
tomorrow, the great word. It is the great word for 
life. What forces are making for life—what 
against life? We want our children prepared for 
life. We send them to school and we provide play- 
grounds. We want them to have sound minds in 
sound bodies. What do we do for their morals? 
Do we prepare for their morals as carefully as we 
prepare for their minds and bodies? We readily 
admit that they must be educated in order to be pre- 
pared for life, but what do we mean by education? 
[ raise the question merely to leave it with another 
question: What does it amount to if they are clever 
but untrustworthy? If they are clever we are proud; 
but if they are moral cowards, what then? Let me 
put the question directly to you. Suppose you hand 
over to them all the advantages of knowledge which 
money can buy, hand over to them all the equipment 
which can be used for success; but if their souls have 
had no training or discipline, what have you done? 
Are they educated? Are they prepared for life? 
They are not. The first thing needful has been 
utterly overlooked. They must be organized about 
moral principles and then all that makes for efficiency 
and happiness is likely to be added to them. 

You now have in mind what I mean by moral 
preparedness for the nation. One prayer should be 
constantly in the national mind: “Create in me a 
clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within 
me.” For a nation to be prepared for its life is to 
be continually renewed in the right spirit. The 


116 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


nation, however, must have a sound and a strong 
body. I would say as simply and unmistakably as 
language will permit that the United States must be 
prepared with adequate naval and military establish- 
ments for defense. Without them we are not pre- 
pared for life. I shall not dwell upon this point 
because for my present purpose it is enough merely 
to refer to it. 

It is appalling to think that it is now in this twen- 
tieth century that nations are willing to go to war 
to achieve their ends. It is the part of wisdom to 
prepare for the now. Certain extremists urge upon 
us the moral superiority of a policy of non-resist- 
ance, and they urge us to scrap the army and navy 
as a lofty example of good will to men. I reply that 
there is no moral superiority in such a policy but 
quite the reverse. We have much to defend and we 
should be recreant if we were to allow ourselves to 
become too feeble for our trusts. At present we 
must be prepared with armaments which have some 
reasonable relation in strength to other armaments, 
or else indeed there would be no sense in having 
any. Some people fear the influence of those who 
live by the making of armaments. They point to 
the scandalous and unscrupulous influence of such 
persons in the past. But if we, ourselves, have no 
armaments what would protect us from such influ- 
ences in other countries? In our own country we 
can, if we will, exercise some measure of control, 
but we have no control over the munition makers and 
the militarists, the autocratic and selfish powers out- 
side of the United States. 

If I go so far, however, with the advocates of 


MORAL PREPAREDNESS 117 


armaments they must go part way with me. Is there 
any person of sense who will maintain that munition 
plants, and armaments, the organization of industry 
and universal military training are the whole story 
of preparedness? Leave out moral preparedness and 
the most important thing is left out. Wealth—we 
have it, but wealth may be a force for decay. Is that 
not one of the clearest truths in human experience? 
Power—we have power but it may be a force for 
destruction. Armaments—they, too, may be agents 
for a selfish national ambition. What do these 
forces mean in themselves? Nothing—but forces. 
The way they are used determines what they mean. 

“Modern war,” it is said, “is a relentless test of 
organization, not only in armaments but in indus- 
try.” True—but not all the truth. It is also a 
relentless test of spirit. ‘The final might of a 
people,” it has also been said, “The final might of a 
people is a spiritual might.” This also is true and 
without such spiritual might there is no real pre- 
paredness, either in war or in peace. Our national 
strength in this time of peace is being measured and 
tested by our spiritual might. 

What will create such spiritual might? The 
answer to that question depends upon our answer 
to another question: What shall be the dominant 
idealism of America; that is, what shall be “the right 
spirit” for this country? I am convinced that the 
main trend among us is toward agreement upon the 
spirit of democracy, the idealism of democracy. 
Democracy is having its struggles to find itself. It 
is mightily disappointing and uncertain at times, but 
when we reach the depths of disappointment over it 


118 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


we have to confess that its weaknesses and failures 
are those of immaturity. We are still undergradu- 
ates in democracy. Consequently there is nothing to 
do but to go ahead and grow up. There is no relief 
in turning backward. All other possible political 
devices have been tried and found wanting. De- 
mocracy is the only faith there is left. It must 
blunder along in its freedom and educate itself and 
moralize itself. The spirit of democracy must be 
our dominant idealism or we have none. We do 
not need more democracy so much as we need to 
cultivate and to improve the democracy which we 
already have. 

Some people are crying out, “We need a conscious 
and dominating ideal in America.” I believe we do, 
but if we have not learned what it is by this time 
we never shall. Moreover, if we have not the cour- 
age to apply it to all our life, to correct all disorder 
and drift, and to lead on to a still wider diffusion of 
spiritual and material well being, we never shall. As 
Ruskin once said: “If necessity breeds no heroism a 
people are not worth their own redemption.” Gradu- 
ally we are gaining courage and seeing the way to 
apply the ideals of democracy to all our life. Po- 
litical democracy is but one expression of democracy. 
All community interests, activities, efforts, labors, 
must express the spirit of democracy, because it 
means this—the common welfare achieved in the 
spirit of fraternalism. 

Moral preparedness in America means the cultiva- 
tion of such a spirit wherever you are and in what- 
ever you are doing—achieving the common welfare 
in the spirit of fraternalism. And as charity begins 


MORAL PREPAREDNESS 119 


at home, moral preparedness must begin at home. 
The spirit of democracy must go with us into every 
relationship of life, into our homes that they may be 
democratic, and into our business and social relations 
that they may be humane, constructive and frater- 
nal. If we are friends among ourselves in our own 
country we shall be more likely to be friends with 
others. If our own house is morally in order it will 
make for internal and external security. Back of 
our armaments there must be not only physical and 
mental strength but a satisfied and loyal citizenship. 
The country must actually mean a blessing to its 
people. How can we expect loyalty from a man 
who lives and works under body-breaking, heart- 
breaking, soul-breaking conditions? I do not see 
how we can expect it. Only in so far as such condi- 
tions are removed can we be sure of a whole-hearted 
loyalty. 

If there is to be industrial stability it must be 
enforced by the right spirit. Industrial problems 
have got to be taken out of the region of strife and 
war into the region of co-operation and fraternalism. 
We all have rather hazy notions of our rights and 
our duties. Traditions of force, of domination, of 
self-interest are still strong but arbitration and co- 
operation are groping their way and they are making 
headway. If there is less industrial warfare it is 
because the right spirit is beginning to prevail and 
because practical methods of adjusting differences 
are being discovered and applied. 

If any one of us has any influence whatsoever in 
a situation where there is estrangement, if any one 
of us can bring to it a broad-minded sympathy and 


120 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


understanding, a spirit of patience and of fair play, 
he can do something effective and practical in the 
way of moral preparedness. In the whole problem 
of patriotism we cannot overlook the significance of 
estrangement. You will remember that it was very 
serious in 1916 when the railroads and the brother- 
hoods had reached a breaking point. If groups of 
people at home feel more hostile against each other 
than against a foreign foe, it means definite national 
weakness. 

At its best the spirit of democracy in the world’s 
work seems to me to be this: A man does not work 
for me but with me—with and not for—not much 
of a difference in words but a vast difference in sig- 
nificance. Wherever people work with and not for 
there is a spirit of co-operation, of democracy, of 
fraternalism. Any one who advances that spirit is 
doing a big work in the moral preparedness of his 
country. The work is constructive, the worker is 
loyal and free. 

It was evident in the Great Struggle, as someone 
has phrased it, “That nation is best prepared for 
war which is best prepared for peace.” When we 
are really prepared for peace we are prepared to 
maintain peace. As never before the heart and mind 
of the world are concentrated on the prevention of 
war. It is not as simple a matter as one might think 
in his exalted moments. It is deeply involved in the 
degree of civilization which the world has reached. 
Today the world realizes that it is doubtful if civ- 
ilization could survive another war which would 
inevitably be more destructive on a world-wide 
scale than the last war was destructive beyond any 


MORAL PREPAREDNESS 121 


other in human history. It may be that the fear 
engendered by such a doubt may be the one thing 
needful to surmount some of the chief obstacles at 
least to the organization of the world for peace. 
Look at it as Stuart Kennedy looks at it! 


Waste of muscle, waste of brain, 
Waste of patience, waste of pain, 
Waste of manhood, waste of health, 
Waste of beauty, waste of wealth, 
Waste of blood, waste of tears, 
Waste of youth’s most precious years, 
Waste of ways the saints have trod, 
Waste of glory, waste of God— 

War. 


To avert such waste, a waste even unto death, 
will require not only international machinery and 
an international mind but an international heart. 
The prevention of war requires a moral imperative 
which shall be decisive. It requires a spirit of inter- 
national democracy, the well-being of all nations 
secured by a spirit of fraternalism. The prevention 
of war is today the great moral problem of the 
world. All other problems depend ultimately for 
solution upon the solution of the war problem. No 
matter how far we get in solving other national or 
international problems, everything may be suddenly 
brought to naught by the outbreak of war. That 
being the case, it 1s morally necessary above all 
other necessities to prevent war. And again, that 
being the case, moral preparedness is the supreme 
necessity. 

A new proposition to this end is the outlawry of 
war. It is a moral proposition and it promises to 


122 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


do a great good as a first step. No one provision is 
sufficient, or infallible, or automatic; but here is a 
proposition that touches the will. It establishes a 
moral attitude for us of great importance. As 
Senator Borah has said, “The first step in the aboli- 
tion of war is the changing of the attitude of the 
public mind toward war, to give war its proper place 
in the public opinion of mankind.” 

To this end a moral educational process must be 
carried on until the public mind regards war as it 
regards murder, condemning war internationally as 
it condemns murder domestically, renouncing the 
use of force in the settlement of international differ- 
ences and misunderstandings as it has renounced 
force in the settlement of domestic differences. 
There would then grow up an instinctive demand 
to substitute methods of reason and of law for 
methods of war. 

The plan must be given profound consideration. 
Our War of Independence was illegal, but the Aus- 
trian ultimatum to Serbia and war upon Serbia 
were legal. War has always been recognized as 
legitimate, while Revolution has been regarded as 
treachery no matter what the aim. A court of inter- 
national justice is important and helpful, a League 
of Nations is important and helpful, but both are 
almost fatally handicapped so long as a resort to 
war is considered legitimate according to the law 
and custom of the world. 

Of course it is not assumed by any one that a 
moral attitude is going to be automatic or infallible, 
but is it not plain that it will help enormously, not 
simply as a formal matter but as a universal habit 


MORAL PREPAREDNESS 128 


of mind, to regard the making of war as a crime? 
No one suggests that invasion shall not be resisted, 
but it is believed that when the world comes to 
regard naturally and habitually that a nation mak- 
ing an aggressive war is doing a criminal act, that 
nation will not only hesitate but it will definitely try 
some other way in order to gain the decent judg- 
ments of mankind. 

I profoundly hope that our own country may have 
the right spirit. We have aspirations that ought to 
be not only a blessing at home but a blessing abroad. 
Let them be strengthened by the consecration of 
religion: “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and 
renew a right spirit within me.” 


Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; 

Where knowledge is free; 

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by 
narrow domestic walls; 

Where words come out from the depth of truth; 

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; 

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into 
the dreary desert sand of dead habit; 

Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening 
thought and action— 

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country 
awake. 


IRON CHARIOTS IN THE ROAD 


Dr. JAMES GORDON GILKEY, 
Springfield, Massachusetts. 


“The men of Judah drove out the inhabitants of the hill- 
country, but they could not drive out the inhabitants of the 
valley because they had chariots of iron.”———Judges 1. 19. 


One of the famous friendships of the last cen- 
tury was between Alfred Tennyson and Arthur 
Henry Hallam. They met at Trinity College, 
Cambridge, when Tennyson was nineteen and 
Hallam seventeen. Both were interested in litera- 
ture, both wrote verses, and as their college course 
progressed their friendship grew steadily more inti- 
mate. When Hallam was twenty-one he took a long 
trip to the Continent in the hope of improving his 
health. The next year he died suddenly in Vienna. 
His untimely death was one of the saddest experi- 
ences in Tennyson’s long life, and some of Tenny- 
son’s most moving verses were written in memory 
of their uncompleted friendship. Many of you are 
familiar with this lyric: 


Ask me no more, what answer should I give? 
I love not hollow cheek or faded eye, 

Yet, O my friend, I would not have thee die: 
Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live. 


124 


IRON CHARIOTS IN THE ROAD 125 


Ask me no more, thy fate and mine are sealed, 
I strove against the stream and all in vain. 
Let the great river take me to the main, 

No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield, 
Ask me no more. 


“T strove against the stream and all in vain.” 
Those words describe one of the strange experiences 
through which all of us—sooner or later—must 
pass. Some of the obstacles in our path we can 
batter down. Time and again we can break free 
from the hindrances thrown about us. Yet there 
are other times when we must accept a tragic in- 
evitable. No ingenuity of the mind, no skill of the 
hand, no resolution of the will can deliver us from 
the limitations we find on every side. “I strove 
against the stream and all in vain.” Hallam was 
dead, and Tennyson could never get him back. All 
this recalls that quaint incident we were reading this 
morning in the Old Testament. “The men of Judah 
drove out the inhabitants of the hill-country, but 
they could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley 
because they had chariots of iron,’ Those Hebrew 
warriors could master some of their foes. They 
were able to beat back the soldiers of the hill-coun- 
try, and finally gain possession of fine table-lands 
and splendid mountain-tops. But the conquest of 
the valley was another story. The defenders there 
had chariots of iron, drawn up across the road. 
Nothing the Hebrews could do would break that 
barrier. Here were limitations that could not be 
pushed aside. The invaders could only confess their 
defeat, and live—with the best grace they could 


126 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


muster—up in the highlands. Iron chariots in the 
road. 

This is an experience that comes to us in many 
different ways. Here, for instance, is a man who— 
all his life long—has been making a heroic fight for 
success. At first he found a dozen obstacles in his 
way—poverty, ignorance, friendlessness. But one 
by one he battered them down. Now at fifty he 
seems master of life. Wealth, power, influence— 
all are his. Is there any land of dreams he cannot 
enter? Are there any chariots of iron drawn up 
across his path? If you knew him well enough, you 
would realize that the very thing he wants most is 
persistently denied him. He wants his sons able to 
carry on the work he has begun. But what a dis- 
appointment they are! Some strange law of heredity 
has given them the very weaknesses he abhors, and 
denied them the very qualities of initiative and 
achievement that have made him the man he is. 
The boys are made of poorer human material than 
their father. Everyone who knows them and knows 
him recognizes a fundamental difference. Can any- 
thing be done about it? Nothing. An ambitious 
father must confess defeat. Or think how often we 
see this situation in the homes about us. Here are 
two women who grew up together years ago. One 
has enjoyed an eminent professional career, the other 
has given her life to her family. Outsiders think 
that both women have everything they want. An 
open road to the land of dreams, and no sign of an 
iron chariot anywhere. But is life what these two 
women want? One would give everything to have 
a home and children—the two things life has denied 


IRON CHARIOTS IN THE ROAD 127 


her. The other will carry to her grave disappoint- 
ments that cannot be whispered to anyone. Iron 
chariots in the road. 


The bare bush close to my window 

Taps and scratches on the glass, 

Taps and scratches... 

It was a maiden once, with the wild heart of a poet, 
One who would not come into the house and be tamed... 
Some people fret at the glass from the inside, 

And some from without. 


Did you think you were the only person here facing 
inescapable limitations and inexorable disappoint- 
ments? Look closer at the lives about you. Every 
one of us finds an iron chariot somewhere. Jesus 
did, too. “The Son of Man must suffer and die.” 
“Must.” An iron chariot even for Him. 

When we meet these insurmountable barriers, 
what are we to do? We can certainly remind our- 
selves that they do not necessitate unhappiness. 
Some of the happiest people the world has ever 
known have been people whose lives were tragically 
hemmed in by chariots of iron. Think of Jesus. A 
dozen bleak barriers were piled about Him. Pov- 
erty and hardship, the misunderstanding of friends 
and the hatred of enemies, and at the end of the 
road a cross whose shadow grew clearer and blacker 
every day. But was Jesus unhappy? “Blessed are 
ye when men shall revile you, persecute you, say 
all manner of evil against you falsely. Rejoice, and 
be exceedingly glad!” We can be happy even if life 
does seem against us. And Jesus’ happiness con- 
tinued to the very end of His days. What are the 
words you hear Him saying just before Calvary? 


128 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


“In the world ye shall have tribulation. But be of 
good cheer, I have overcome the world!” ‘Good 
cheer’—promised by a Man whose life had been 
one disappointment after another, and whose career 
ended in the agony of crucifixion. Ever since Jesus’ 
time men and women have proved repeatedly that 
happiness—real happiness—can be found inside a 
ring of iron chariots. Listen to these sentences 
from a recent autobiography. “There are many 
penny philosophies of life in these days in which 
success and pleasure count for everything. But 
when a man has gone through the discipline of 
tuberculosis he learns to laugh at them if he does 
not weep at them. For the insight to which all the 
loss and pain and disappointment have finally 
brought him is this: that a man can get on without 
success and without pleasure, and still live and laugh 
and grow, pass from understanding to understand- 
ing, and in the end thank the gods for giving him a 
chance to be.’ Who wrote that? A poor fellow 
struck down by tuberculosis just as he was begin- 
ning a career in New York City, exiled to the Adi- 
rondacks for the rest of life, and forced to watch 
one hope after another—for himself and his wife 
and his children—vanish into thin air. Edward 
Livingstone Trudeau, radiantly happy in spite of 
circumstance. How can you win that victory? 
Stop thinking about the things that are denied you, 
the unattainable plains beyond the iron chariots. 
Think instead of the things that are incontestably 
yours, the mountain tops that you have won and that 
no one can ever wrest from you. This single change 
in your habitual attitude will bring surprising hap- 


IRON CHARIOTS IN THE ROAD 129 


piness and peace to your tired spirit. Wilfrid 
Gibson is describing a great many homes and a 
great many disheartened parents when he draws this 
picture of an English household: 


All life moving to one measure, 

Daily bread, daily bread: 

Bread of life and bread of labor, 

Bread of bitterness and sorrow, 

Hand to mouth and no tomorrow, 

Death for house-mate, death for neighbor... 
Yet when all the babes are fed, 

Love, are there not crumbs to treasure? 


Granted that some things are denied us. Some 
things are ours. Put your mind on them. The 
iron chariots lose their power to discourage us when 
we remember the hill-tops that are indubitably our 
own. 

We gain still more courage when we recall that 
God has made, time and again, a splendid use of 
restricted lives. He can do something fine with us 
even if circumstances do seem hopelessly hostile. 
Here is a principle which has brought comfort to 
hundreds of young people as they dream of making 
some contribution to the life of their generation. 
They realize their limitations, but they know that 
God takes ordinary people and finally makes them— 
half imprisoned though they are—the builders of a 
new and better world. Henry M. Stanley, reared 
in an almshouse and handicapped by poverty and 
friendlessness, is the one who gives his generation 
its knowledge of Africa. James Watt, sick and 
starving on eight shillings a week, crying at last in 
utter despair, “Of all foolish things, nothing is so 


130 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


’ 


foolish as trying to be an inventor,” is the one who 
gives the world the steam-engine and inaugurates a 
new era in human progress. Louis Pasteur, crip- 
pled at forty-six by a paralytic stroke, and ham- 
pered for the rest of his life by that cruel limitation, 
is the one who gives humanity its knowledge of 
germ-life and begins the development of modern 
medicine. Booker Washington, born in slavery and 
so poor that he had to crawl under a board-walk in 
Richmond for shelter at night on his long tramp to 
Hampton Institute, is the one who finally lays the 
foundation for the education of his race. Here are 
the men through whom God achieved His purposes 
for mankind. Every one of them was surrounded 
by inexorable chariots of iron. Yet see how much 
God made them mean to the world! You are dis- 
heartened this morning? You think that a young 
man with your handicaps can never amount to any- 
thing? Pluck up courage. Live at your best. No 
one can guess how much God can do for the world 
through you if you will only make the most of 
yourself for Him. 

This same principle applies to the older people 
around whose lives the barriers of age and weakness 
rise so steadily. Think how often God uses such 
people—hampered on this side and restricted on 
that—to inspire and re-direct the life of the new 
generation. At twenty-one Longfellow wrote his 
mother: “A letter from you, Mother dear, is more 
helpful to me than all the sermons preached in 
Lent. The very glimpse of your handwriting is a 
greater incitement to virtue than a whole book of 
moral discourses.’ Her value to God and life ex- 


IRON CHARIOTS IN THE ROAD 131 


hausted? The iron chariots might hedge closer and 
closer, but God still had something splendid and sat- 
isfying for her to do. You came to church this 
morning thinking that all your chances were gone? 
That you meant nothing to a busy world and an 
unseen God? O believe in yourself! God still has 
work for you to do. The people here need you— 
your love, your courage, your silent influence— 
more than you, or they themselves, dream. 


’Tis only when they spring to heaven that angels 
Reveal themselves to you. They sit all day 

Beside you, and lie down at night by you 

Who care not for their presence, muse and sleep... 
And all at once they leave you, and you know them. 


Even more courage comes to us when we recall 
that the barriers in life prove, more than once, 
friendly rather than hostile. Usually the iron chari- 
ots are dragged into place by the blundering hands 
of circumstance. Usually they represent a genuine 
barrier, something tragic for us and for God as well. 
But how many times we realize, in the light of later 
experience, that they were walls of guidance rather 
than walls of limitation. Abraham Lincoln’s life 
offers a clear example. All his earlier ventures 
ended in failure. “He attempted a military career, 
and went to the Black Hawk War a captain. But 
through no fault of his he returned a private. Then 
he tried store-keeping, but his little country-store 
‘winked out.’ He experimented with surveying, but 
in the end his surveyor’s compass and chain had 
to be sold to pay his debts. He was defeated in 
his first attempt to be nominated for Congress, de- 


182 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


feated in his application to be appointed Commis- 
sioner of the General Land Office, defeated in the 
election for State Senator in the Illinois Legisla- 
ture of 1854, and defeated again when he hoped 
to be nominated for Vice-President in 1856.” One 
barrier after another blocking the way. Iron char- 
iots on this side and that. Who put those chariots 
there? A cruel fate . . . or was it a loving God? 
No one can explain the barriers built around your 
life. They are, like the unmerited suffering found 
everywhere in life, a riddle to the wisest of us. 
But what does Christianity say to you? “Break 
down these limitations if you can. Fight your way 
past the iron chariots if you see a way. But if the 
barriers are too much for you, accept them. Ac- 
cept them quietly and without bitterness of spirit. 
After all, you can find happiness inside that iron 
wall. After all, God can still make some fine use 
of your life. After all, the chariots may be put 
there by the hands of love. To keep you from a 
false road. To hold you in the path God wants 
you to follow.” You say life is still a strange 
puzzle? But as yet you have little perspective on 
it. Wait till you can study all these experiences 
against the background of eternity. Even the iron 
chariots may begin to glisten with beauty and pur- 
pose. The unity of life may become apparent at 
last. 

We cannot look beyond 

The spectrum’s mystic bar; 

Beyond the violet light, 

Yea, other lights there are, 


And waves that touch us not 
Voyaging far. 


IRON CHARIOTS IN THE ROAD 133 


Vast, ordered forces whirl 
Invisible, unfelt; 

Their language less than sound, 
Their names unspelt. 

Suns cannot brighten them 

Nor white heat melt. 


Here in the clammy dark 
We dig, as dwarfs for coal; 
Yet One Mind fashioned it 
And us, a luminous Whole: 
As lastly Thou shalt see, 
Thou, O my Soul! 


But this is only part of the story. The iron 
chariots that block the advance of one generation 
are tumbled off the road by the resistless attack of 
the next. You and I may face today limitations 
that no one of us knows how to master. But it is 
almost certain that our children, or their children 
after them, will learn to conquer these barriers and 
push forward unhampered on their quest for finer 
and happier life. Consider our conquest of disease. 
There was a time when plague and epidemic were 
masters of mankind. No one knew how to break 
free from them. In helplessness and fear men 
crouched despairingly before these chariots. Do 
you remember Cotton Mather’s description of the 
smallpox epidemic that raged in Boston in 1678? 
“Never was it such a time in this city. The burial- 
places never filled so fast. To have coffins crossing 
each other as they were carried into the street, to 
have I know not how many corpses following each 
other to the grave close at the heels, to have thirty- 
eight die in one week, and seven, eight or nine die 
in one day—yet thus hath it lately been. To at- 


184 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


tempt a bill of mortality and to number the very 
spires of grass in a burying-place seem to have a 
parity of difficulty. Of my father’s seven children, 
four have already been visited. God fit and pre- 
pare us for the three strokes that are yet behind.” 
That last sentence is the most touching of all. Four 
children down with the smallpox, and now nothing 
to do but wait for the other three to contract it. 
What an iron chariot, drawn up invincibly across 
the road of humanity! And yet that iron chariot 
has been swept away. Advancing medical science 
found a way to topple it off the path. Today all 
of us break free from that old hindrance as we 
struggle forward toward a finer health and vigor. 

It is the glimpse of this resistless forward-surge 
that gives us confidence in the ultimate elimination 
of war. Do you realize what has been happening 
in the years that have intervened since 1913? Men 
everywhere have learned what modern war is. Who 
wants another? Not one of us. Soldiers and civil- 
lans, young men and old, veterans of the last war 
and those who only read its unspeakable horrors— 
all of us want peace. There is a new element in 
human life. Never before in history have common 
folk hated war so bitterly, longed so ardently for 
friendship, co-operation and lasting peace. And 
during these twelve years the organizations that are 
working for peace have grown immeasurably in 
power and influence. In 1913 the men and women 
who were thinking about world-peace and strug- 
gling to organize the life of the nations on a new 
and a more fraternal basis were a small and insig- 
nificant group. Today the workers for peace cover 


IRON CHARIOTS IN THE ROAD 135 


the earth. If another war should threaten it would 
encounter a wholly new opposition. Not only the 
feeling of a war-sick world, but the determined ef- 
fort of thousands of leaders the world over. Only 
one great chariot remains in our way, stained with 
the blood and grime of unnumbered battle-fields. 
Some day that chariot too will be toppled from the 
road. Before our children will open the valley of 
the world’s desire. The valley of enduring peace. 


Liberty, what of the night? 

I feel not the red rains fall, 
Hear not the tempest at all, 

Nor thunder in heaven any more. 
All the distance is white 

With soundless feet of the sun, 
Night with the woes that it wore, 
Night is over and done! 


THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE SUFFERINGS 
OF JESUS 


A Good Friday Sermon 


DEAN WILLARD L. SPERRY, 
Harvard University 


“And they compel one Simon a Cyrenian, who passed by, 
coming out of the country, to bear his cross.”"——Mark xv. 21. 


This man Simon was presumably a Jew from 
North Africa. He had travelled over a thousand 
miles to keep at the temple and in the holy city 
the feast of the Passover. We can imagine him, 
on the morning of the last day of his long journey, 
climbing the very last stage of his pilgrimage, and 
singing as he came the pilgrim song of his people, 
“T was glad when they said unto me, let us go into 
the house of the Lord, My feet shall stand within 
thy gates, O Jerusalem.” 

Suddenly he is confronted with a mob coming 
out of the city, a band of soldiers, and a criminal 
going to his death. The criminal stumbles and falls 
under his burden—the cross on which he was to 
die. The Roman law made any citizen of the em- 
pire liable to press gang service, carrying the bag- 
gage of the army, for one measured mile. The 
soldiers, disdaining to touch the cross, seized upon 

136 


THE SUFFERINGS OF JESUS 137 


this pilgrim, faced him about in his tracks, and 
marched him out to Calvary bearing the cross of 
Jesus. 

One has no difficulty in imagining Simon’s anger 
and bitter resentment at this humiliation. Such an 
ending to his long journey. Such a degradation 
to be endured forever in memory. Such a tale to 
take shamefaced home to Africa. Yet the gospels 
refer to him as a familiar person, the father of 
Alexander and Rufus. The answer is clear. That 
day made a Christian of Simon of Cyrene. And 
what seemed at first his shameful indignity became 
his badge of honor and his pledge of immortality 
in men’s memory. 

If I were asked to give a simple untheological 
account of the Christian religion, I think I should 
read Joyce Kilmer’s “Prayer of a Soldier in 
France.” 


'My shoulders ache beneath my pack, 
(Lie easier, Cross, upon His back.) 


I march with feet that burn and smart, 
(Tread, Holy Feet, upon my heart.) 


Men shout at me who may not speak, 
(They scourged Thy back and smote Thy cheek.) 


I may not lift a hand to clear 
My eyes of salty drops that sear, 


(Then shall my fickle soul forget 
Thine Agony of Bloody Sweat?) 


My rifle hand is stiff and numb, 
(From Thy pierced palm red rivers come.) 


138 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


Lord, thou didst suffer more for me 
Than all the hosts of land and sea. 


So let me render back again 
This millionth of thy gift. Amen. 


A Christian is a person who in life and death knows 
that he is not alone, he is companioned in his ex- 
perience by Jesus. 

We come, on Good Friday, to the end of Jesus’ 
life and ministry on earth. What waits for us on 
Easter Sunday belongs to another life and another 
world than this. 

There are two simple accounts which may now 
be given of that life and death. Jesus told us 
things that otherwise we never should have known 
and Jesus did for us what we could never do for 
ourselves. The cross is the final pledge of such a 
mission, It is something strong and stable to which 
in weakness we can cling, It towers o’er the wrecks 
of time as something quite outside our own lives, 
and yet as being the hope of those lives. 

And the other theory seems to me both older and 
newer. In life and death Jesus shared our lot with 
us to the full. In finding ourselves we always find 
him, in finding him we find ourselves. Whenever 
we become what we know we ought to be we are 
conscious that our path meets the way that Jesus 
went, and that we are together with him in the way. 

Without denying the element of truth in the 
former account can we not say that this latter ac- 
count has in its keeping the secret of the influence 
of Jesus and of the continuance of Christianity 
among men? 


THE SUFFERINGS OF JESUS 139 


Jesus, long ago, called men to be with him in 
preaching and teaching and healing. And toward 
the last he told men that they must also take up their 
cross and follow him. That was what Christianity 
meant to Paul, a life that was no longer alone, but 
was companioned still by Christ. a life that knew 
among other things the fellowship of the sufferings 
of Christ. 

It is, I think, impossible to escape the strange 
feeling that on his cross Jesus went far, much far- 
ther beyond the common lot, than most men go— 
that he was never so alone in the world as on Good 
Friday. But there is danger in that vision of the 
Cross, the danger that standing for something so 
unlike our life and death it may cease to have 
meaning for us. 

The death of Jesus must be clouded in mystery 
for us. All the mysteries of our life wrap round 
it. The mystery of loneliness, the mystery of pain, 
the mystery of the world’s injustices, the mystery 
of the lost cause, the mystery of faith and hope 
and love. 

But it is just because no one of us ever clears 
these mysteries quite away, that the mystery of the 
cross is a part of our own lives, and we know that 
here where he was lifted up he gathers all men unto 
him. 

Simon of Cyrene in first stern fact, Joyce Kil- 
mer in the latest and no less stern fact—each of 
them bowed to the burden of the cross. 

Only two or three nights ago a friend was talk- 
ing about just this aspect of the Christian life. 
“We speak of the cross,” he said, “and yet what 


140 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


always troubles me is the comfort of our lives, their 
ease, their security, their remoteness from the cross. 
I cannot make it seem right.” Who is there of us 
here today who can speak of the cross as being the 
daily way and law of his life? If ever there was 
a day when we should look with severer censure 
upon our ways of life, it is today. Each man’s 
conscience must give answer as to his relation to 
the cross. Perhaps not only Jesus, but Simon the 
Cyrenian and Joyce Kilmer alike have passed 
beyond us altogether. 

But men do not have to seek the cross, always. 
For often it seeks them, as it sought Simon and 
as it sought that American soldier. The better you 
know human life the more clearly you feel the 
heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelli- 
gible world. There is not one of us who is not 
turned again and again in his day’s march, faced 
about upon his own affairs and his own purpose, 
and made to bear the stern military burden of this 
soldier world. How false the easy and superficial 
views of facile happiness are to the facts. How 
each passing year sobers, saddens, and strengthens 
our common humanity. 

If you have ever watched one human soul march- 
ing up to its solitary Golgotha, with a courage that 
does not falter, with faith that does not fail, with 
love that loves unto the end, you cannot think of 
the cross as something strange and apart from the 
whole nature and destiny of the human soul. As 
a Christian minister I must heed the story of the 
crucifixion, but as a Christian minister I am grate- 
ful beyond words to those who in life and death 


THE SUFFERINGS OF JESUS 141 


have taught me its present meaning and power. I 
have seen Christian after Christian go up to his 
Calvary like Christ, with Christ. And I know this, 
beyond all doubt and disproof, that that way lies 
man’s victory over the world, over death and pain 
and wrong, and that beyond the place of the Cross 
man’s immortality must lie. In our need and weak- 
ness and extremity we are never alone. Christ 
passed that way before. Every place of pain and 
suffering and sacrifice that we must go he has 
strangely made ready for us, and there we find him. 
“Again and again,’ said a great soul not long since, 
“T have been terapted to give up this futile hopeless 
struggle of religion. But whenever I turn away I 
see that strange man hanging on his cross, and he 
turns me back again.” Is not that the heart of this 
sad splendid day? “In the world ye shall have trib- 
ulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the 
world.” Let me leave with you a single strain of 
the ecclesiastical music of Thomas a Kempis. It 
falls on our modern ears like the plain-song of a 
far off time, and yet it has the simple strength of 
plain-song. It is a Kempis’s song about “The 
King’s Way of the Holy Cross”: 


To many this seems a -hard saying, Deny 
thyself; take up thy cross, and follow Jesus. 
But the Cross will be the sign in Heaven; when . 
the Lord shall come to judgment. 


Why then fear to take up the Cross, through 
which lies the road to the Kingdom? In the 
Cross is salvation, in the Cross is life; in the 


142 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


Cross is strength of mind, in the Cross joy of 
spirit, in the Cross the sum of virtue. 


Take up, therefore, thy Cross and follow 
Jesus. He went before bearing his Cross and 
died for thee on the Cross, that thou also mayest 
bear thy Cross. 


Walk where. thou wilt, seek what thou wilt, 
thou wilt find no higher way above, no safer 
way below, than the way of the Holy Cross. 
Dispose and order all things as thou wilt and 
seest, yet thou shalt only learn that thou must 
always suffer, willingly or unwillingly, and so 
thou shalt always find the Cross. 


The Cross, therefore, is always ready and 
everywhere waits for thee. Thou canst ‘not 
escape it whithersoever thou runnest, for go 
where thou wilt thou carriest thyself with thee 
and shalt ever find thyself. Turn thyself up- 
wards, turn thyself downwards, turn thyself 
outwards, turn thyself inwards; everywhere 
thou shalt find the Cross. 


And how dost thou seek any other way than 
this King’s way which is the way of the Holy 
Cross? 


THE RESURRECTION 
AN EASTERTIDE SERMON 


Dr. ELwoop WORCESTER, 
Boston 


“That I may know him and the power of his resurrection.” 
——Philippians iii. 10. 


At this season, it appears to me, a congregation 
has a right to expect of its preacher not merely the 
result of his thoughts and studies, but a candid 
statement of his personal faith. I suppose there 
are few men in this country to whom these subjects 
have a greater fascination than they have for me, 
few who have studied the beliefs we commemorate 
today more attentively than I have—both the Resur- 
rection of Jesus through the critical study of the 
New Testament, and our survival of bodily death 
by every honorable means open to us. As a result, 
I find my faith in both growing stronger and 
stronger, until it has become the chief possession 
of my life; and I know of no fact or discovery 
which is dangerous to either. I regard the Resur- 
rection of Jesus as a true, objective, historical fact, 
an appearance of the living after actual death, an 
occurrence, like other events of the past, dependent 
in part, on the evidence of eyewitnesses. 

143 


144 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


To gain this conviction it is not necessary for us 
to thread our way through the maze of Biblical 
criticism and the conflicting statements of the Gos- 
pels. Few of us are able to do this. This was not 
required of Christians of old, and it 1s not required 
of us. “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the 
Lord Jesus and shalt believe in thy heart that God 
hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” 
That was enough for them and it is enough for us. 

If Jesus had desired to take this subject out of 
the domain of faith and to prove the fact so as to 
leave no room for doubt, a single appearance in the 
temple at the Passover, when the whole nation was 
gathered there, would have settled the question for- 
ever. He did not choose this way. He appeared 
only to certain chosen witnesses, to men who already 
knew and loved Him and were thinking about Him. 
From this we see, at once, a certain spiritual and 
psychical character in these events, and that the 
Lord adhered to His old rule of offering no sign 
to unbelief. 

When we consider the nature of these appear- 
ances, which were sudden, brief, unexpected and 
made to different persons, we are not surprised that 
the accounts in the Gospels are also short and frag- 
mentary and that they were written without much 
reference to one another. The case is entirely dif- 
ferent with St. Paul. St. Paul, in the Fifteenth 
Chapter of First Corinthians, gives us an extended 
survey of the whole subject. He gives us, it is 
true, no bright, sensuous pictures, no detailed nar- 
ratives after the manner of the Evangelists; but he 
presents to us a complete inventory of all the Re- 


RESURRECTION AN EASTERTIDE SERMON 145 


surrection appearances of the Lord which he con- 
sidered genuine, and the correct order of their 
occurrence. The denial of any resurrection on the 
part of some of the Corinthian Christians com- 
pelled St. Paul to consider carefully the historical 
evidences of the Resurrection of Jesus. Are you 
aware how good this evidence is? So good that 
if all other statements were placed in one scale and 
this single passage were placed in the other, Paul’s 
witness would preponderate. It is contained in an 
Epistle whose authenticity has never seriously been 
questioned. ‘The measured sobriety of Paul’s lan- 
guage, the strict limitation of the appearances of 
the Risen One, his careful mention of names, his 
confident appeal to many living witnesses, the psy- 
chological probability of his sequence, his rigid ex- 
clusion of all legendary, highly colored incidents, 
all produce an impression most favorable to his 
truthfulness and to his painstaking care. Paul in- 
troduces this evidence by the significant statement: 
“T delivered unto you, first of all, that which I my- 
self also received.” The usual date assigned to this 
Epistle is about the year 55, but the words “I de- 
livered unto you first of all” carry us back about 
four years further to Paul’s first visit to Corinth, 
while the words “that which I myself also received’’ 
can hardly have any other meaning than that these 
statements in regard to the Lord’s Resurrection 
appearances formed part of the traditions of the 
old Apostles and earliest Christians communicated 
to him during his two weeks’ visit to Peter, de- 
scribed in Galatians as taking place three years after 
Paul’s conversion, somewhere about the year 35. 


146 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


So that instead of an anonymous oral tradition fly- 
ing around the world for a generation, we have here 
a written and carefully considered statement from 
the hand of Paul, whose substance dates not more 
than five years from the event. 

But even this is not the only or, perhaps, the 
chief source of our faith, any more than three 
or four accounts of Niagara Falls are the cause of 
Niagara Falls, or even why people who have never 
seen the falls believe in them. The New Testament 
itself, the marvelous change which these events pro- 
duced in the Apostles, the conversion of St. Paul, 
the establishment of the Christian Church and its 
continued life, all sprang from this event, and with- 
out it they would not have taken place. When you 
stand on the field of Waterloo and look at the 
mound which marks the position of the English 
squares in 1815, or when you stand in Rome before 
the triumphal arch of Titus, with its procession of 
bearded Jews, bearing candlesticks, to commemorate 
the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70, it does not re- 
quire fanatical faith of you to believe in the histori- 
cal events they commemorate, apart from the critical 
study of books. In the new life Jesus gave to the 
world during these few days, we see a greater and 
a more important fact than the fall of Jerusalem 
or the battle of Waterloo. 

In all this I have made no claim for the re- 
animation of a physical body. Some of the Bish- 
ops of the communion to which I belong, but by 
no means all of them, assert that faith in Jesus 
demands and requires physical resurrection. In 
this they are not well guided, and this demand will 


RESURRECTION AN EASTERTIDE SERMON 147 


not strengthen faith; it only strengthens incredulity, 
especially as it is contradicted not only by St. Paul 
who speaks only of a spiritual body, but by the very 
Gospels to which we are obliged to appeal. For a 
body which appears and disappears at will, is not 
immediately recognized and which passes through 
closed doors, is no body of flesh and bones. No 
sooner do the materially-minded find themselves 
with a material body on their hands than they are 
obliged to dematerialize it again, and to pass, with 
uncertain steps, from eating and drinking to van- 
ishings and reappearances and to passage through 
material substances. The present ending of St. 
Mark’s Gospel even describes one of these appear- 
ances as “in another form.’ Moreover, a physical 
resurrection would be no support to our faith at 
all, for we know well no such fate is in store 
for us. 

What actually happened to the body of the Lord, 
or what caused its disappearance, I know not, no 
one knows. The question was discussed at the time 
St. Matthew’s Gospel was written. The Fathers 
frequently speculated on its disappearance. Ter- 
tullian hazarded the suggestion that it had been 
removed by Joseph’s gardener. Bishop Westcott 
thought that the power of God caused it to disap- 
pear. When men thought that our own resurrection 
would be material and physical and that heaven is the 
physical abode of God, resting on the upper side of 
the firmament, it was natural for them to conceive of 
the Resurrection of Jesus in the same terms; but 
in the presence of this infinite universe, as it has 
been revealed to us during the past ten years, such 


148 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


ideas simply vanish and disappear, and we may truly 
say: “Mortality is swallowed up in life.” 

Death is not a passage from one part of the uni- 
verse to another. It is a passage from one state 
of being to another. We shall not want these old 
bodies in our new life, and we could not carry them 
with us if we did, for they belong to this world. 
They were made altogether of earth’s substance, 
they are made with reference to the surface of the 
earth, this atmosphere, this temperature, and when 
we die they are resolved to dust. It is the destruc- 
tion of the old life which makes the new life 
possible. 

No one has believed in the Resurrection of Jesus 
with more passionate ardor than St. Paul. It was 
the cause of his conversion, the substance of all his 
preaching, and yet from first to last he speaks only 
of a spiritual body. He establishes the strongest 
antitheses in language between the body that dies 
and the body that lives hereafter. “It is sown in 
dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weak- 
ness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical 
body, it is raised a spiritual body.” In rehearsing 
the various appearances of the Lord, he monoto- 
nously repeats the same word ophthé, He was seen, 
He appeared, but nothing more. 

From this point of view the whole matter of the 
Resurrection is so much more probable and in ac- 
cordance with our knowledge of what is possible, 
the sudden appearance and disappearance, the pass- 
ing through closed doors, the traumatic stigmata 
and the fact that these appearances ceased a few 
days after death are so comprehensible and natural 


RESURRECTION AN EASTERTIDE SERMON 149 


that it becomes mere perversity to doubt them. 
Without the experience of the phenomena such 
stories would not have been invented, especially as 
the Apostles were looking for no such humble oc- 
currences, but, if they had any expectations for the 
future, for the return of the Lord in glory. Never 
was Jesus’ Resurrection believed in so firmly and 
on such good grounds as it is today, and by another 
century no educated man will doubt it. 

But, you ask, if Jesus did not rise in a physical 
body, in what kind of a body did He rise? That 
is exactly the question which the Corinthians asked 
St. Paul, and I will answer you as he answered 
them. No one who truly looks forward to a life 
after death conceives of it as involving the loss or 
the diminution of his personality. We do not think 
of the mingling of all souls together, or of the dis- 
appearance of our personal life in the life of God. 
That is pantheism, but it is neither Christianity nor 
immortality. Neither are we able to think of the 
soul as existing without a body, without some form 
and organism and expression which distinguishes it 
from every one else, a body by which it acts on its 
world and receives impressions from its world. 
Once before, in the first life, God, through your 
soul, mysteriously built for you a body, wholly and 
perfectly adapted to a life which was to come. So 
again, here and now, you are secretly and invisibly 
building for yourself the body you shall wear here- 
after, and that body, though not yet complete, is 
already in existence. In this church, this morning, 
there is almost, I might say, another congregation 
—one consisting of the persons we know, who will 


150 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


die one after another. The other, of the persons 
we scarcely yet know at all, who will emerge as the 
former disappear and who will live after the other 
bodies have undergone death. 

Apart from this body of dust, hidden by this 
house of clay, there is even now the spiritual body! 
Oh! so much fairer! Oh! so much more glorious! 
A body which represents you perfectly in your 
thoughts, your affections and memories, and which 
some time will disengage itself from the old body 
by the loosening of a thousand silken cords and 
stand forth, strong and radiant and beautiful to 
enter its new life. Now you go up and down slowly 
and heavily on feet of flesh. Then you will pass 
from, one end of the world to the other on the light 
wings of the Spirit. A new body will not be made 
for you out of nothing. It will not be sent down 
from Heaven for you. The body you have made 
yourself and which perfectly represents you is re- 
vealed as the old body falls from you. That is all. 
“Not that we should be unclothed, but clothed 
upon.” 

That, in different language, is what Paul an- 
swered to those who questioned him. He described 
the new body growing out of the old as the plant 
grows out of the seed. He compared it to the glory 
of the sun and the moon and the stars. In such a 
glorious, immortal and spiritual body Jesus rose. 

This is the cogent and sufficient answer to those 
who ask: Shall I see my beloved ones again? Shall 
I know them again? Will the old sweet life ever 
be resumed? Shall we continue to help and bless 
each other as in the days of old? This longing to 


RESURRECTION AN EASTERTIDE SERMON 151 


meet again, to know again those from whom we 
have been separated will be satisfied more fully than 
you dare to hope. Oh! that God would permit me 
to say some word of consolation, of solemn assur- 
ance and truth that the soul, with its love, never 
dies. Or, a thousand times better, that He would 
reveal it to our hearts and take from us forever 
our groundless, senseless fear of death, by which 
we wrong God and the dead, and show ourselves 
unworthy of our religion. In the old days of Chris- 
tianity when faith was strong, Christians did not 
keep their birthdays, nor ask their friends to cele- 
brate them, because they said that a Christian’s true 
birthday is his entrance into life. 

The walls which separate the world of matter 
from the world of spirit are growing thin—not 
merely to faith, but to science. You walk across 
the country some night. Not a voice speaks. All 
is silence and darkness and you feel that you are 
quite alone. You return to your house and place 
to your ear an instrument fashioned to catch vibra- 
tions from the air, and instantly the silence becomes 
vocal, filled with music you could not hear before, 
charged with intelligence, and you perceive that you 
are not alone, but, in some marvelous way, in rap- 
port with other living men and women. So it is 
when you sustain a great loss and the happy house 
of your life contracts to four bare walls, and the 
heavens above you are dark and silent and the 
future is utterly uncertain, and you walk alone in 
the night. Yet there are voices able to break that 
silence and to assure you of their continued existence 
and their love. To-day the greatest of all voices, 


152 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


the voice of our Lord Jesus Christ, speaks to us 
across the gulf of death, and tells us all that we need 
to know—‘‘Because I live, ye shall live also.” 

In the course of my long ministry I have sat by 
many a death-bed. Several times I have seen the 
faces of dying men and women brighten with an 
unearthly light as they appeared to see and to rec- 
ognize some unseen presence. I have heard them 
greet and address, with loving, rapturous words, 
departed friends, totally invisible to me. In every 
instance within my experience this has proved an 
immediate precursor of death. In commenting on 
this occurrence with a learned and widely-experi- 
enced physician, I received from him several highly 
interesting examples of similar events which had 
taken place under his observation, one of which 
occurred just before the death of my famous and 
saintly relative, Dr. Joseph Worcester of San Fran- 
cisco. This physician added: “Among the old 
doctors who were accustomed to remain with their 
patients to the end, these facts were well known, 
and it was commonly held that the appearance of 
the dead to the very ill was to be regarded as a 
definite indication of approaching death.” This 
means that when our end approaches those whom 
we have known and loved are aware of it and they 
are close beside us to receive us, and that when our 
eyes close on this world the first objects we shall 
behold are the faces of those we have most loved, 
who stand beside us to welcome us and to go with 
us into our new life. 


And with the morn, those angel faces smile, 
Which I have loved long since and lost a while. 


THE VISION OF THE PURE 


BisHop Francis J. McConneE Lt, 
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 


“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”—— 
Matthew v. 8. 


This is one of the passages on which it seems 
almost presumptuous to speak. The utterance is 
itself final. It would do violence to seek to take 
from or add to this word of Jesus. The experience 
—even the life—of Jesus is compressed within these 
few syllables. 

It often happens, however, that passages like this 
become more forceful, not if they are formally ex- 
pounded, but if they are approached now from one 
angle, and now from another. We have in this 
beatitude a perfect manifestation of the clear light 
of our Master’s insight. Is it not sometimes true, 
however, that because of the sheer perfection of 
light we miss this marvel? Does not the man with 
the spectroscope who unweaves the light into its 
separate colors help us to a new appreciation of 
the miracle of light? 

If we look closely at the teaching of Jesus, and 
at the teaching of some who stood close to him, 
we can discern at least a few of the diverse rays 

153 


154 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


which went into the making of the beams of clear 
light. Let us look at some of these. 

The first suggestion that occurs to all of us is 
the contrast in inwardness between the purity of 
which Jesus spoke and the ceremonial purity of the 
Pharisees. Blessed are the pure im heart. Jesus 
was always trying to force the problem of purity 
down into the inner depths. The Sermon on the 
Mount is in large part just a commentary on, and 
an illustration of, the truth that purity must be 
inner, that deeds like murder and adultery are not 
merely outward acts but expressions of an inner 
disposition. 

All this is to-day commonplace enough on its di- 
rect statement, but think of the force given to this 
oft-spoken commonplace by the present-day stu- 
dents of the inner life—whatever we call that inner 
life, soul, or self, or consciousness. Jesus was not 
speaking in terms of modern psychology, but his 
utterance has been wonderfully reinforced by that 
psychology. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is 
he. Purity is an outcome of the subconscious or 
half-conscious. The thoughts which we shelter 
down in the deeper realm, allowing them to linger 
along in the region of the half-thought, or half-felt, 
or half-imagined, determine our purity or impurity. 
It is as if some deep lake, set among the hills, could 
not catch in its bosom as in a mirror the far glories 
of the upper-sky because it allowed soiled currents 
to arise out of a muddy ooze. 

We hear a good deal now and again to the effect 
that Christian purity is in its nature negative. We 
become weary of being told to cleanse our hearts 


THE VISION OF THE PURE 155 


of evil, to cast out selfishness, to reject the low and 
earth-born. We turn with relief to that doctrine 
of self-realization which tells us to “express our- 
selves’ without much regard to what is expressed. 
Weare to allow whatever is im us to come out. The 
trouble here is that we do not get rid of evil by 
expressing it. The more we express it the more 
it becomes part of ourselves. The advice to get 
rid of evil just by expressing ourselves is at times 
almost as sound as the advice to get rid of profanity 
by swearing. We cannot get rid of anything by 
saying it “to free our minds.” The things we say 
are more a part of us after we have said them than 
before. The obligation is put upon us to see that 
nothing is cherished in that deep inner realm that 
will hinder the vision of the highest. To object to 
such care of our inner selves as negative, ascetic, 
puritanical—is as reasonable as to object to care 
of a mirror or a lens as merely negative. Remov- 
ing soil or stain from the face of the glass may 
indeed be negative in itself, but it makes possible 
the catching of the beauty of a star or a face. Jesus 
saw men washing platters and hands and faces, to 
win the favor of God. In his thought the real 
mirror which must be kept clean is an inner one, 
if that mirror is to seize the vision which is above 
all visions worth seeing. 

Still, there is point in the objection that purity is 
not to be conceived of too much in negative terms. 
Jesus did not mean by purity merely the cleansing 
of the life as one would polish a mirror. In a great 
passage he declared that the eye is to be single if 
the whole body is to be full of light. If the eye is 


156 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


double the whole body will be full of darkness. 
Then he added that men cannot serve God and 
Mammon. Purity, then, is a true adjustment of 
focus. A man cannot adjust his eyesight to two 
different objects at exactly the same instant. He 
can look at one and then look at the other, but the 
attempt to focus on two at once leads to a twisted 
distortion. 

As we study the history of human progress we 
are struck by the part played by the discovery and 
invention of instruments of precision. Knives with 
sharper edges, scales with finer graduations, lenses 
with more exact curves, mathematical formulas with 
keener distinctions have been the means with which 
men have come to larger vision of nature’s laws 
and meanings. So in the realm of spirit. Better 
focusing of moral purpose has led to clearer vision. 
The pure life has not meant just a general intention 
to do as well as may be under the circumstances, 
to have, in general, the “right spirit.” It has meant 
rather the finer, closer apprehension of a moral 
God, a God with a spirit of Christlikeness. The 
passage before us does not say: Blessed are the 
pure in heart, for they shall see a set of general 
statements or a theology. They shall see God, 
whose spiritual glory shines before us in the face 
of Jesus. 

It has often been observed with justness that 
Christianity, conceived in the spirit of its Founder, 
does not seek to destroy any of men’s powers. It 
strives rather to focus those powers on the right 
objects. It comes to the man who has twisted and 
distorted his gaze with the wrong focus, and tells 


THE VISION OF THE PURE 157 


him to focus that gaze on God. If he will make 
God the center of his thought all else will fall into 
right place. Nothing will be destroyed. The soul 
will be delivered from strain just as the eye is de- 
livered from strain when the focus is made true. 
The liberty of the Christian is like the relief of the 
eye when after fruitless straining it begins to see 
objects with sharp outlines and to behold colors 
with distinctive shades. The field of view ceases 
to be hazy. Things are not all “run together’ in 
the field of vision. There is a top and bottom to 
the picture—a right and a left. 

Jesus speaks repeatedly of Mammon as having 
this distorting effect on the spiritual vision. He 
does not rail against wealth as such, but he does 
point to the impossibility of having both God and 
Mammon at the center of the field of view. It is 
possible to make God supreme; it is possible to make 
Mammon supreme—though few would be willing 
avowedly to do so—but it is not possible to make 
God and Mammon together supreme. To attempt 
to do so leads not to outright spiritual blindness, 
indeed, but to a distortion of vision which is almost 
blindness. Twisted standards of value—distorted 
notions of righteousness, dullness of the edge of 
moral discrimination—all these come upon the mind 
which tries to make God and Mammon together the 
object of concentrated gaze. It is like trying to 
look one way with one eye and another way with the 
other eye at the same time. Beware of the deceit- 
fulness of riches, said Jesus. The deceitfulness is 
in the vision of a topsy-turvy world, small objects 
made to look big and big objects little, all with 


158 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


spiritual eye-strain which means, in the end, vexa- 
tion and torture of spirit. 

The material things have their place, but that 
place is not in the straight line of direct gaze. That 
belongs to God. If the gaze, however, centers on 
Him the material things take their place as giv- 
ing added force to those moral values which they 
serve as instruments. Material things are instru- 
ments. They are not to take the place of spiritual 
values. 

Single purpose, correct focus, true moral perspec- 
tive, these are of that purity of heart which makes 
possible the vision of God. Yet all this is capable 
of being stated in yet another phrasing. . 

A writer filled with the spirit of Jesus tells us 
in one of the epistles that to the pure all things are 
pure but to the defiled and unbelieving nothing is 
pure. While we must never speak as if the scrip- 
tural writers were writing as modern psychologists, 
we repeat that here again the words are in line with 
our present-day conception of an active mind which 
reads off intelligence in the outer world because the 
mind already possesses intelligence itself. The 
scientist tells us that if we are to think strictly of 
the outer world of nature we must think of it as a 
set of vibrating forces. The waves of those forces 
beat upon my eyes and I respond with a vision of 
form and color. In a sense I see the color and the 
form because they are in my mind, not however 
in my mind alone. A child speaks to a father. 
Nothing physically reaches the father except the 
forces set going by the child, but the father feels 
more than forces beating upon him. Back of the 


THE VISION OF THE PURE 159 


forces are the interest and love of the child. We 
believe that we receive messages from outside our- 
selves, we believe that an outer intelligence answers 
to the intelligence within ourselves. Where an im- 
perfectly developed mind might not see meaning, 
another mind hears voices from distant spaces or 
across the ages. He who would get wealth from 
the Indies must take the wealth of the Indies to 
the Indies. 

The world has again and again been amazed at 
the skill with which archeologists have read the 
secrets of past civilizations from fragments of 
buildings, bits of baked clay, shreds of papyri. 
Arabian nomads, Egyptian day-laborers, Mesopota- 
mian peasants have for thousands of years been 
seeing and handling all of these things and have had 
no other thought of them than as rubbish. It re- 
quired minds already filled with the vision of the 
past splendor of Egypt and Babylon to read off the 
story of the far-away civilization. Ancient cities 
have sent their messages across the ages, but only 
the intelligence already on the alert for just such 
signs has understood. He who from a heap of 
stones or bricks rebuilds a city of Rameses or of 
Hammurabi must already have those cities in his 
mind. 

I trust such illustrations will not seem altogether 
unworthy as a hint of the process by which the pure 
mind comes to a belief in a pure God. The illustra- 
tion of the ancient city is admittedly inadequate 
except suggestively, for there we are dealing with 
material fact. Still, just as mind believes that intelli- 
gible messages are messages from intelligence, just 


160 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


as the mind cannot rest in the belief that the beauty 
of flower and mountain and sunset is just an illusion 
of the mind’s own creation, so the pure heart believes 
that its convictions about moral purity have their 
source in the moral God. 

Further, we are discerning to-day with increasing 
clearness the significance of sound bodily health for 
sharpness of sight. We do not seek to improve eye- 
sight merely by dealing with the eye itself. The stu- 
dents of our bodily processes are teaching us that 
sickly and morbid and infected tissues in any part of 
the human organism may impair the keenness of the 
eye’s vision or even destroy that vision altogether. 
So that the first and indispensable requisite to good 
vision is sound health. 

So likewise soundness of spiritual health tends to 
keenness of spiritual vision. We do not attain to 
the knowledge of God just by cultivation of specific 
religious faculties, any more than we attain to keen- 
ness of eyesight by seeking to develop the eye alone. 
Here is where some of the mystics have failed. 
They have sought to develop a special faculty for 
seeing God, without enough regard for the general 
life-processes out of which true vision comes. I 
would not in the least disparage the importance to 
religion of much of such definite search, but I can- 
not read the struggles of some mystic seekers for 
the vision of God without feeling that the prepara- 
tion has not been thorough-going. What! Are not 
all these specific spiritual exercises a mark of thor- 
ough-going spirit? Not as long as they do not take 
account of the significance of the common, work-a- 
day moral processes of life as bearing on the power 


THE VISION OF THE PURE 161 


to see God. Anything that makes for health and 
soundness of mental and moral life is a necessary 
toning-up of those fundamental processes out of 
which keenness of sight comes. 

Ts it not true, however, that the deepest under- 
standings of God have been given us by those who 
have felt that the world is sick—out-of-joint—that 
life is illusion? Deep insights into the nature of 
God have indeed thus come, but, after all, the ideal 
vision is that of abounding vitality showing itself in 
the sharpest, finest sense of awareness of God. 
Sweet, indeed, are the uses of adversity as leading to 
the vision of God. Seldom is it indeed that pros- 
perity leads of itself to spiritual knowledge, but 
surely there must be some insights to be born of 
prosperity as truly as insights are born of adversity. 

I once knew a man who was at once the healthiest 
human being and the sharpest-sighted that I have 
ever known. All his bodily functions seemed to 
work perfectly. He never knew pain or discomfort 
through the inadequacy of the working of his 
organs. So far as he knew, or any one could know, 
he obeyed the laws of nature and departed not from 
their path. With this there went the quickest, keen- 
est sight I have ever known. It was as if every 
drop of fluid that fed the organs of sight were dis- 
tilled good health, with every capillary, every muscle, 
every nerve working to help the eye see quickly, 
clearly, sharply. At incredible distances, in dim 
lights, this man’s eye had an almost uncanny power 
to become aware of objects where the ordinary 
human gaze could see nothing.. When men speak 
to me of the vision of some as sharpened by suffer- 


162 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


ing I think also of the vision of those sharpened by 
good health. 

After all, some one may say, it is misleading to 
speak so definitely of the human eye as illustrative 
of the inner eye which sees God. We may lend sup- 
port to the false notion that the vision of God is an 
experience like actual eyesight. What we mean by 
seeing God is attaining to a conviction of his reality, 
an awareness of spiritual values, a certainty that the 
Power back of the universe is Christlike in holiness 
and love. These are wholly spiritual visions. We 
must have care, then, in using the eye even figura- 
tively to describe the inner sight. 

The word of caution has a measure of force, but 
Jesus himself uses the eye in this figurative way. 
Moreover, as plain matter-of-fact the purging of 
the soul-depths of selfishness, the focusing of the 
thought on the Christlike God, the cultivation of an 
inner purity which like an inner intelligence sees 
purity outside itself, the development of the moral 
health by daily practice in work-a-day righteousness 
lead to that certainty and awareness of the divine 
which we have in mind when we speak of the vision 


of God. 


RELY PATE TO. GOD 


PROFESSOR HARRIS FRANKLIN RALL, 


Evanston, Illinois 


The reality of God is the supreme conviction of 
religion. It is man’s deep persuasion that above him, 
about him, within him is another world than the 
world which he sees, and that in this world he may 
find the real meaning of his life, the good which 
alone can satisfy him, the strength by which he is to 
live. He feels, as William James once put it, that 
life “is continuous with a wider self through which 
saving experiences come.” And that is why the 
supreme concern of religion is the search for God. 
It is Job’s cry: “Oh, that I knew where I might find 
him.” It is the psalmist’s prayer: 


“My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: 
When shall I come and appear before God?” 


It is not knowledge that men want here; they are 

not seeking doctrine or definition. It is life that 

men seek. How can I know this unseen world, they 

cry, this world that is real and enduring; how can 

my life touch this life and gain strength and joy and 

peace? That is man’s search for the path to God. 
Let no one think this question belongs to an 

163 


164 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


earlier age which we have left far behind. When 
we have finished boasting of our day as the age of 
wealth and material progress, and when we have 
made our religion perfectly rational and purely prac- 
tical, then the soul of man cries out again in Augus- 
tine’s ancient word: “Thou hast made us for thyself, 
and our souls are restless till they rest in thee.” 
That is the meaning of all those cults that come and 
go in our day, with their promise of help from 
hidden sources whether within us or without. That 
is the reason for the hopeful fact that our maga- 
zines are printing so many articles on religion. That 
is why one of these articles in recent months dealing 
with the ways of prayer called forth thousands of 
appreciative letters. 

All this makes vital for us the question as to the 
path to God. If there be about us an unseen world 
of beauty, and truth, and love, and righteousness, if 
our true life be hidden in that world, how may we 
know that world and enter into it? How may we 
have fellowship with it and thus have life? The 
question, in a way, is much like that which faces us 
in the world of nature. The life of the savage is 
poor and mean in the midst of a world of boundless 
resources. He does not know what power is hidden 
in the world about him, in water, and wind, and soil, 
and in the treasures under the earth; nor would he 
know how to use these forces if they were pointed 
out. But the scientist comes and tells us what these 
forces are, and the inventor and engineer show us 
how to relate ourselves to these forces so as to use 
them. There is no magic here, no chance; all is 
order, all is sure. 


THE PATH TO GOD 165 


So it is in the world of spirit; we may be poor 
in the midst of plenty, but there is a true and certain 
path. That path depends upon knowing what this 
world is and rightly relating ourselves to it, only it 
is the personal and spiritual this time with which we 
have to do. What this world is we have sought to 
understand in the meditations of the first days of 
this week. We have sought the answer in the 
Christian conviction that we may call this hidden 
world of the spirit God, and that the light of the 
knowledge of the glory of God is known to us in 
the face of Jesus Christ. It is not some vague 
atmosphere that surrounds us, nor some impersonal 
force, nor is it merely the strength that is in our own 
spirit or the life of our human kind. It is the far 
God, infinitely above us in majesty and power, in 
love and righteousness. It is the near God, about 
us and within us, near us in pity and love, by our 
side as fellow worker, within us as the indwelling 
Spirit of mercy and justice and truth. 

There is a path to this God, a fourfold path. 
Prophet and psalmist and apostle point it out to us 
as we turn the pages of the Bible; Jesus above all, 
whose life of serene peace and quiet strength and 
clear vision show how the world of the spirit lived 
in him, and countless other men who have walked 
this way. 

1. Their first word is this: God is goodness and 
the path to God is trust. It is fear and distrust that 
bar the door against love and help. It is anxiety that 
eats up the strength and peace within. God is our 
friend and trust is the first step to friendship. It is 
not credulity that is wanted here, nor blindness. We 


166 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


are not asked to shut our eyes in the face of evil 
and declare that all is good. But faith has the 
daring courage that believes that goodness is on the 
throne, that truth and love and righteousness are 
the deep tides of the universe, whatever cross cur- 
rents and eddies there may be. And faith adven- 
tures its life on that side. That is the challenge 
which faith meets; and its experience shows that it 
has found the path to God. It was experience that 
spoke in the prophet’s word: “In returning and rest 
shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence 
shall be your strength.” There is a confidence be- 
gotten of long years of fellowship when Jesus calls 
men to quit their anxieties and fear and to trust in 
the goodness of the Father in heaven. There is an 
authentic note when Whittier prays, 


Dear Lord and Father of mankind, 
Forgive our feverish ways! 


Religion is the great affirmation, not of mind alone 
but of heart and will; and life shows that in that 
attitude man links himself with God and so with 
the forces that make for strength and life and peace. 

2. The second path to God is that of moral fel- 
lowship. And that too follows from the nature of 
God himself. If God were simply a force, then we 
should ask how we might use it. If he were a 
theory or a principle, then we should need merely 
to demonstrate him or understand him. If he were 
some exacting Sovereign then we should ask about 
the ritual of court approach and the sacrifices that 
he demanded. But long ago the prophets gained 
vision of a truth that changed religion from center 


THE PATH TO GOD 167 


to circumference: God is first of all a moral char- 
acter. He is righteousness, justice, goodness, truth. 
These are not pale ideas, not mere words; they 
stand for a purpose and a passion. God is that 
Being of infinite good will who hates oppression and 
loves mercy and seeks the highest welfare of his 
creatures. He is no cold and distant judge, no mere 
giver of commands or unmoved spectator of our 
struggles. In all our affliction he is afflicted, and 
the angel of his presence saves us. His goodness is 
positive, militant, sacrificial, the goodness that we 
see in Jesus Christ. 

To such a God as that the path is moral loyalty. 
How can it be aught else? For we are seeking the 
path to God, not simply the way to his gifts. The 
way to share God is to share his life, and this is his 
life. The path to God is fellowship in that which is 
central in the life of God. To do justly and to love 
kindness, that is to walk humbly with God. Every 
summons of duty, every call to higher living, every 
appeal of service, is his voice; and every response of 
obedience leads us more deeply into his life. Here 
is the one sure way: “He that willeth to do, shall 
know.” In nineteen centuries of history the fol- 
lowers of Jesus have differed on almost every con- 
ceivable question—yes, on all questions but one, and 
that is the meaning of the spirit of Jesus. We have 
not always been loyal to it, but we know where it 
leads. What we do not know or have not faced is 
this, that loyalty to this spirit is the straight path 
to God whatever doubts of mind a man may have, 
and that without this loyalty our creeds and our 
philosophies are vain, | 


168 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


3. Worship is the third way in this fourfold 
path to God. We need not take back one word that 
has been said as to the way of obedience, as to that 
life of active service in which we come to know God 
and share his very being. But there are the ele- 
ments of rest in the life of religion as well as the 
elements of action, and there is a service of mind 
and soul as well as of the will. How shall men 
learn to trust God if they do not really know him? 
And how shall their life be enlarged by the great- 
ness of God if that greatness has not dawned upon 
them? Worship does not call for the sycophant, it 
does not mean self-abasement. It is the worship of 
a free man looking up to that God who says, “Son 
of man, stand upon thy feet.” And there is nothing 
worthier of this free man than true worship. For 
this is the mark that separates man from beast, that 
man can look upward. He alone lives in two worlds, 
this world and that which is above. He alone is con- 
scious of two lives, the life that is and that which 
ought to be. Man’s worship has these two sides, 
the upward look, the supreme act of mind by which 
man reaches out to the infinite that he may see and 
wonder and adore; and the bowed soul, hushed in 
reverence and awe, knowing its weakness and sin 
and need, yet rejoicing that its life belongs to such 
a God. Whatever the value of other paths, none 
can take the place of worship. 

If there is one word which the men of old have 
for our day, surely it is here. They tell us the 
story of their own lives. Here is a young man, 
Isaiah by name, patriot, prophet, leader. Did he 
believe in God? Well, yes, as the rest of us do; 


THE PATH TO GOD 169 


but first of all he believed in king and country. 
And then the great king died, upon whom he set his 
hopes. The young man turned to worship and so 
gained at last the vision that changed his life. “I 
saw the Lord, high and lifted up.” It was not the 
vision of an hour; it was a Presence before which 
he walked all his days, a Presence that widened his 
horizons, that shaped his purpose, that gave him 
courage and peace. Here is the abiding service of 
the psalms. They take us by the hand and lead us 
out of the world of the petty and sordid and selfish 
into the presence of God. Again we sing, “Lord, 
thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.” 
Our minds grow as they dwell upon the meaning of 
God. Our selfishness is shamed by his goodness. 
Our weakness partakes of his strength. Our fears 
are lost in his peace. 

4. The final path to God is the way of love. 
Tolstoy saw this when he wrote, Where Love is, 
God is. Centuries before Tolstoy one of Chris- 
tianity’s greatest interpreters declared: “He that 
loveth not, knoweth not God; for God is love. And 
he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God 
abideth in him.” It is not some vague emotion that 
is intended here, some mystic ardor that inflames the 
soul. Tolstoy meant man’s love for men. The 
Apostle John makes plain again and again that he 
is concerned with man’s love for his brother. “If 
a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is 
a liar.” In searching and unforgettable words Jesus 
has given us the test by which to know whether we 
are really children of the Father. God, he declares, 
is infinite good will, the Spirit of pure and perfect 


170 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


love. Indifference, ingratitude, even evil in man is 
no bar to that love which goes out to all. If we 
share that spirit then we are his children, then we 
have found the path to God. 

But love is not merely the sign that we have 
found God and that God is in us; it is itself the way 
to God. And of the paths that lead to God there is 
none simpler or more available than this. There 
are men for whom it is not easy to reach God in 
thought, or, having’ conceived of this Infinite Being, 
to give their lives in trust to him. But human life 
and human need are on every side, and this least 
thing we all can do, like Browning’s Bactrian, who 
“could not write nor speak, but only loved.” But 
when we have answered the call of love we shall 
find that we have answered the call of God. There 
are men to whom God has seemed distant and hard 
to grasp, while a brother’s need was very real and 
near. So they have given themselves to service and 
love, to the life of unselfish good will. Shall we 
not say that they too have found God? For is not 
all love of God, like all truth and righteousness? 
Is it not God who speaks in the face of a child, 
through the need of a brother man, in the call of 
some great cause of justice, or in the simple fellow- 
ships and loyalties of daily life? And if men do 
not realize it here, will they not some time hear him 
say: “I was in the heart of that child, in the need 
of that brother, in the fellowship to which you were 
loyal; inasmuch as you did it unto the least of these, 
you did it unto me’? Lowell caught that truth in 
his poem, The Search: 


His throne is with the outcast and the weak. 


THE PATH TO GOD 171 


A recent writer has put it in some lines inscribed to 
Jane Addams in which, in parable form, he suggests 
the secret of the inner strength and peace which 
mark that notable spirit. He makes her tell of her 
search for that river, the streams whereof make 
glad the city of God. Disappointed, she hears at 
last the voice: 


“O fool, you have traveled far to find 

What you've crossed over time and again; 
For the River of God is in Halsted Street 
And is running black with men. 


And low in the rushes the river sings, 

And sweet is its spirit lure, 

For it waters the joys of loving and living 
That grow in the hearts of the poor.” 


So I took me a place in the City slums 
Where the River runs night and day, 
And there I sit ’neath the Tree of Life 
And teach the children to play. 


And ever I soil my hands in the River, 

But ever it cleans my soul; 

As I draw from the deep with the Silver Cord, 
And fill the Golden Bowl. 


Such is the fourfold path to God: Trust, worship, 
loyalty and love. Only let this be clear to us, it is 
not a road that we travel once and then leave behind. 
The figure of the path may mislead us here; for God 
is not a place to which we journey, he is a Person 
with whom we maintain fellowship. The life of 
the Spirit can be shared only in an attitude that is 
renewed every day. Each day we must take this 
path to God, just as each day we open our eyes to 
the light or breathe anew the life-giving air. Each 


172 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


day the soul must bow in worship and look up in 
aspiration ; each day our strength must come through 
the same spirit of trust; the attitude of simple loy- 
alty, of quick obedience, must mark each day; each 
day we must walk the way of mercy and good will 
if we are to share the life of that God who is love. 
Only then shall our peace be as a river, and our 
righteousness as the waves of the sea. 


THE INTERPRETING CHRIST 


Dr. FREDERIC W. PERKINS, Lynn, Massachusetts 


“Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus.” 
——Phillipians ii. 5. 


I 


A fundamental need of effective Christianity is 
to allow Christ to be the interpreter of his own 
religion. That would seem to be obvious, and yet 
curiously enough men have customarily set forth as 
faith in Christ belief in almost everything else but 
Christ. The spiritual bankruptcy of much that 
passes for the religion of Christ to-day is tragic 
witness to the harm which this historic reversal of 
values has produced. 

What is faith in Christ? It is sharing the faith 
of Christ. That is the heart of it. It may gather 
to itself much more. It cannot be a spiritual dyna- 
mic, “the power of God unto salvation,” if anything 
less. The only faith in another person that proves 
its vitality by getting results is faith in what that 
person believes in, the ideals that inspire him, the 
unseen realities that evoke his loyalty and toil and 
sacrifice. In the nature of things it must be so. 

We Americans are given to proclaiming our faith 
in Washington. What does it mean? Nothing real 

173 


174 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


unless it means sharing, or bravely attempting to 
share, the faith of Washington—his faith in a seem- 
ingly hopeless cause, his courage to dare when it 
was righteousness that justified the daring. The 
soul of Washington was the soul of a mighty ad- 
venturer, one of that fellowship of brave spirits in 
all ages who endure as seeing the invisible, accept- 
ing life, when crises come, as a hazard of new for- 
tunes, an opportunity to take apparently reckless 
chances for ends yet unwon. Cautious, prudent, 
weigher of expediencies though he was, that was 
the flaming soul of him. Otherwise he never would 
have led what one of his biographers has termed 
“almost the most hair-brained enterprise in history,” 
with no organized government to support him and 
only faith in a cause and an uncertain people to 
sustain him. To share that spirit is to have faith in 
Washington. Lacking it, our professed faith is but 
the measure of our distrust. And it is too often 
distrust rather than faith that Americans reveal 
when they would moor the ship of state to the text 
of the “Farewell Address’ rather than spread their 
canvas to the winds that blow in our day as he dared 
to sail by the winds that blew in his. 

So must it be in any profession of faith in Christ. 
Except it mean sharing the faith of Christ it means 
nothing. It may, indeed, range from trembling 
hope, shadowed by fitful misgivings when we fortify 
ourselves by doubting our doubts rather than his 
faith, to robust, buoyant certitude. But it is sharing 
his faith in the good God and the fellowship that 
opens the way to the inflowing of the Divine. It is 
sharing his faith in man’s capacity to respond to 


THE INTERPRETING CHRIST 175 


truth and righteousness. It is sharing his trust in 
the royal law of service as the standard of greatness 
and the secret of social stability. It is joining in 
his confidence that justice and good-will and brother- 
hood have the potency of the unconquerable Will in 
them, and that the kingdom of God is a winning 
cause, not a forlorn hope. Something like that, 
far beyond the reach of most of us though it is in 
its richness and power, was the faith of Christ, and 
the degree of our faith in those eternal realities 
measures our faith in him, its radiant examplar and 
the chief source of its transforming power. 

Now when we conceive of the Christian religion 
as first of all an endeavor to share the faith of 
Christ, we are following the order of historical de- 
velopment. The early Christians were called simply 
disciples of “the Way.” To be a Christian was to 
follow Christ’s way of life. To be sure, the gospel 
writings and the heroic missionary endeavors re- 
corded in the Book of Acts were colored by a sense 
of the impending end of the world. The first Chris- 
tian preachers considered themselves as hardly more 
than evangelists of the kingdom that Christ was to 
establish at his early second coming. How far Jesus 
shared their expectation or how far it reflects the 
prepossessions of his ambassadors, we need not now 
discuss. The fact remains that what is set forth 
with imperishable clearness is a way of life that 
remains valid after the apocalyptic dream was out- 
lawed by time. Even the fourth gospel, which ts the 
evangel set in a philosopher’s mold, cannot obscure 
it. ‘‘By this shall all men know that ye are my dis- 
ciples” abides when the Logos doctrine has passed 


176 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


away. The “Way” was not an inference from the 
formal doctrine; the formal doctrine was an attempt 
to interpret the meaning of the “Way.” From 
Jordan to Calvary the road runs as a shining track 
which the wayfarer cannot miss. 

This is no plea for the “simple gospel” of those 
who think to discover it by merely stripping off its 
historical elaborations. The attempt cannot succeed, 
and if it could it would mean mental and spiritual 
impoverishment. The simplicity of Christ is in no 
such negative residuum as that. What is alive 
grows, and to grow 1s to grow complex. To attempt 
to find the simple gospel merely by abstracting it 
from the thought forms and ceremonial symbolisms 
and institutional embodiments it takes on in a world 
of living men is as mistaken as the attempt to find 
the simple life by withdrawing from the world into 
the solitude of the desert. The way of Jesus does 
not run through an intellectual vacuum. The men 
who travel it will think about the meaning of it— 
whence it comes and whither it goes, and what sort 
of being the pathbreaker is who opens the road 
through the valleys and over the hills of human ex- 
perience. And when they think, they will think in 
terms of the world in which they live. So, for ex- 
ample, did St. Paul, Christian philosopher as well as 
missionary. As Francis G. Peabody has said in his 
illuminating study of “The Apostle Paul in the 
Modern World’: “A man of great intellectual 
gifts, passionate emotions, and untiring vitality 
finds himself committed to a cause which is in 
danger of becoming provincial, racial and restricted, 
and asks himself how the kindling and reconciling 


THE INTERPRETING CHRIST 177 


message which burns within him can be delivered 
to a larger world. It must speak the language of 
the world; it must interpret current thought in terms 
of the new obedience; it must universalize Christian- 
ity by drawing to its service all the visions of God 
and schemes of redemption which were familiar in 
the West or imported from the East. In short, there 
confronted this new convert precisely the same prob- 
lem which meets any thoughtful Christian in the 
modern world.” 

It is an unescapable problem. As long as men 
think they will express the philosophical implications 
of the gospel in creedal formularies. As long as 
they wonder and adore they will clothe the gospel 
message in imaginative symbolism, “the outward 
and visible sign of an inward, invisible grace.” And 
as long as the faith of Christ is a living reality will 
they associate themselves together in ecclesiastical 
fellowships. The forms may be perversions and will 
need amendment and revision, but the instinct to 
formulate is not itself a perversion. 

Here, then, is the situation. On the one hand is 
the religion of Jesus, his way of life, set forth in 
the Sermon on the Mount, the great parables, and 
the gospel of the kingdom. On the other hand are 
its theological implications and corollaries, its spon- 
taneous symbols, its incurable tendency to embody 
itself in institutions—all constituting the shifting, 
often illuminating, often obscuring, religion about 
Jesus that inevitably arises as the original faith 
relates itself to a living world. The process is 
dangerous, but there is no escaping it. How can the 
danger be lessened? How can we keep to the road 


178 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


in the midst of the alluring by-paths? By remind- 
ing ourselves that the way of Jesus is the road and 
that the theories about him and his way are but paths 
of approach. We must insist that the various 
theories and institutions have no value as factors in 
the Christian way of life except as they fortify our 
purpose to live it. More than that, the purpose to 
live it must come first. Given that purpose, the 
reinforcing doctrine, the suggestive ceremony, the 
serviceable fellowship of the like-minded will 
be added; but they will not of themselves create 
it. 

The science of navigation was discovered by 
stout-hearted voyagers who launched their ships and 
steered by the stars; the seaman preceded the navi- 
gator. In such fashion is it with the religion of 
Christ. ‘The gospel,” says Dr. Jacks, “is neither a 
sermon nor a treatise on religion, but a story, which 
tells how Christianity began in something that hap- 
pened, in a deed that was done, a life that was lived. 

. Something to talk about was furnished before 
the talking began.’ The impact of Christianity is 
the impact of a life. Its power is in the contagion 
of a personality more than in the logic of a doctrine 
or the spell of a mystery. Let no one imagine that 
such simplifying of the Christian religion in thought 
makes it any easier of accomplishment. For every 
intellectual difficulty removed a spiritual difficulty is 
enhanced, but it is a difficulty whose heroic challenge 
calls out the power to meet it. The way of Jesus 
leads to the truth about Jesus, as the way of the 
deep leads to an understanding of the laws that 
control it. 


THE INTERPRETING CHRIST 179 


II 


This habit of regarding one’s Christian faith as 
primarily sharing in the faith of the original Chris- 
tian yields two further important results. It vitalizes 
one’s religion by a dynamic leadership, and it sets 
the true standard of discipleship. 

The Duke of Wellington, so it is related, was once 
listening to a group of clerics discussing the practi- 
cability of the teachings of Jesus. At length he 
brusquely ejaculated: “Gentlemen, what are your 
marching orders?’ The old warrior’s ideal of dis- 
cipleship is not to be taken as the Christian standard. 
It was, indeed, from that sort of blind subserviency 
to authority that Christ sought to deliver his fol- 
lowers. Christ is not a spiritual autocrat. He seeks 
not satellites but companions; not slaves but free- 
men. And yet the Duke’s military instinct sensed a 
vital element in effective discipleship which liberal 
Christianity has been too apt to understress or 
ignore. 

A Christian is a person under orders. He is 
obeying the compulsion of a mighty objective. Like 
Luther at Worms he cries out, in sacrificial self-sur- 
render: “God helping me, I can do no other.” He 
is marching with an army, not simply going to 
school. Grant that it is voluntary enlistment, not 
conscription; but having enlisted, he is under orders 
as inexorably as the soldier who is gathered by the 
draft. The service is the road to larger freedom, 
but it is not the freedom of irresponsibility. That 
sense of committal is a distinctive sign of a disciple 


180 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


of Christ. He shares the fortunes of a Leader 
greater than himself, to the fulfillment of whose 
enterprise he is pledged. 

There is no conflict here with the loyalty to 
reason and conscience on which the liberal rightly 
insists. Christ insists on it too. He not only re- 
spects spiritual freedom; he demands it. He asks 
no man to abdicate the authority of his own con- 
science. He refuses to substitute his dogmatic coer- 
cion for a disciple’s personal judgment. Rather 
does he release the creative energy of men’s souls 
that they may think and act for themselves. “How 
think ye?” was his characteristic mode of approach. 
There is something exquisitely deferential in such 
appeal to the best in individual experience to validate 
his teaching. 

When, for example, the lawyer, seeking to en- 
tangle Jesus in theological casuistry, asked, ‘“Who is 
my neighbor?” Jesus threw the question back, after 
telling the immortal story. “Which of these three 
thinkest thou was neighbor unto him who fell among 
thieves?” That was more than clever debating. It 
voices Jesus’ faith that men carried in their own 
hearts the answers to the deepest questions con- 
cerning God and brotherhood and duty and destiny, 
if they would only pay attention to them. He asked 
for no loyalty to him that was not loyalty to the best 
in themselves. 

But having assented to Jesus’ truth, what then? 
The man who conceives of his faith as sharing in 
the faith of the original Christian finds himself 
shifting the emphasis from arguing truth to using 
it. It is just that change of emphasis that is at the 


THE INTERPRETING CHRIST 181 


heart of the Christian religion. It used often to be 
said in the early days of protest against the auto- 
cratic authority ascribed to Jesus—“‘the noxious ex- 
aggeration of the personality of Jesus,” as Emerson 
termed it—that the truths of Christianity would be 
as true if a Hottentot had taught them. But it was 
not a Hottentot who taught them. It was one Jesus 
of Nazareth, and that made all the difference in the 
world. It is personality that makes truth effective, 
and behind the truth of Christianity is the driving 
power of a dynamic personality, transmuting truth 
into power. It was with the effectiveness of truth 
that Jesus was concerned, and the Christian who 
shares his spirit must share his concern. Under the 
contagion of Jesus’ leadership the disciple lifts the 
truths of the gospel out of the theologian’s labora- 
tory and blazons them on the banner of a host sing- 
ing, “Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to 
war !” 

Are you enlisted in that host, eager to make that 
truth effective? That is Jesus’ test of discipleship. 
He includes in his fellowship all who meet it. None 
are excluded because they happen to differ on ques- 
tions subsidiary to it. 

Jesus was very explicit about that. “He that 
heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them” 
builds on the enduring rock. “Why call ye me 
Lord, Lord, and do not the things that I say?’”— 
so does he subordinate formal homage to moral 
allegiance. “By this shall all men know that ye are 
my disciples, if ye have love one toward another’”’— 
so does he put his sign-manual on his followers of 
every age and creed. The lovers of men share the 


182 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


mind of Christ, and no lesser tests of creed or cere- 
mony, whether orthodox or heterodox, must be set 
to bar them out. 

Those who, like myself, profess to be liberal 
Christians, may well take that to heart as we exer- 
cise our creedal freedom in the theological contro- 
versies of our day. I speak, for instance, as one 
who interprets the story of the Virgin Birth as a 
poet’s description of a spiritual result rather than a 
scientist’s explanation of a biological process. If, 
however, a literalist more truly possesses the mind 
of Christ, if he more faithfully loves God and serves 
men, if his sacrifice for the common good is more 
complete and his vision of the heavenly kingdom 
more compelling, he is a better Christian than I am. 

Here, then, is the living principle that is fusing 
into spiritual unity Christians of many theological 
varieties—the unity to which the King’s Chapel 
week-day ministry and this volume of sermons con- 
vincingly testify. It is a fellowship so real that it 
needs not to be fabricated but only to be recognized 
and expressed. Christian unity is something more 
vital than an aversion to theological quarrels. There 
is indeed a gain for kindliness and for the amenities 
of civilized existence when ecclesiastical neighbors 
decline to quarrel. It is a greater gain when they 
discover the common faith that transforms acquies- 
cent neighbors into mutual friends. For it is only 
a common faith that unites, not merely a fiberless 
tolerance or an uncontentious good nature. The 
larger spiritual fellowship of our day has a center 
of loyalty more fundamental, more powerfully in- 
citing to sacrificial devotion, than the lesser sectarian 


THE INTERPRETING CHRIST 183 


loyalties to which we so easily yield. That vivifying 
center is a common purpose to share the faith of 
Christ. Not until that faith in the kingdom of God 
and the truths it involves has become a consum- 
mation we really care for above partisan glory or 
denominational aggrandisement will the larger fel- 
lowship be felt to be a necessity. And until that 
fellowship seems necessary it will mean little more 
than a polite gesture, like “the distinguished con- 
sideration” which jealous diplomats accord each 
other in official notes. The fellowship of Christ 
springs not from silence concerning the creeds that 
separate, but from loyalty to the faith that unites. 
“Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”’ 
This is a world of many spiritual tongues in which 
men variously utter a common vision and passion 
and purpose. The Church of the Living Spirit can- 
not limit its sympathy or fellowship to the speakers 
of a single provincial dialect, even though it be 
trying to say the greatest truth in the spiritual 
horizon. It is from faithful life to faithful life 
that the enkindling spark of Christ’s fellowship 
passes. Its heat and passion transmute the dialects 
that differ into the understanding that is one. We 
may differently conceive of our common Master. 
We may believe in the victory of the kingdom of 
God with varying degrees of assurance, ranging 
from eager hope to serene confidence. But if to our 
faith God is Love, whom we know only as we love; 
if humanity is a brotherhood in which he is chief 
who serves most; if the only unfaith is distrust of 
the power of right, and the only heresy is exploiting 
the weakness of men; if the kingdom of God is sure 


184 WEEK-DAY SERMONS IN KING’S CHAPEL 


because the Divine intent is behind it, and the cause 
of Christ carries a pledge and potency of triumph— 
then any man who holds that faith can understand a 
fellow-believer, whatever his lips may say. They 
have the witness of the spirit that they are one. 


-_ Me ra 
Johar 

pater 
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piacereinate 


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no< ets oo 
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